


Once, and Only Once

by heelbruiser



Category: South Park
Genre: Depression, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-24 05:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10735020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heelbruiser/pseuds/heelbruiser
Summary: A very drunk Stan abruptly disturbs Kyle from his sleep to request a late-night ride home.





	Once, and Only Once

From the inside of his room, the only noise that resonates is the delicate pitter-patter of snow colliding with the window. Kyle lay just below it. With his body facing toward the wall, he slept on his side wrapped in his quilt in the particular way he enjoyed: the edge of the blanket tucked just below his elbow, one leg encased in its footing, the other outside of it exposed to the gentle air. There were few moments in his life that could compare to the serene and ritualistic peace he felt when he could crawl into his bed at night, just beneath the window, and cover himself in this manner and fall asleep.

Without a moment to even process his consciousness, he’s startled from his sleep by the sudden tone of his cell phone ringing. Sitting still for a second or two, he listens for the brief sound again, hearing both its irritating ring and cackling vibration against the night-table. He throws his arm out to feel for it, groggy and unwilling. He pulls the phone within two inches of his face, focusing his eyes as best he can against the harsh blue light, and finally makes out the name: Stan.

Kyle sputters into the phone, trying to force his paralyzed vocal cords to work. “H…hello?”

There’s nothing on the other end; as he listens in, he can only focus on the sharp crackling of the wind into the receiver, and wonders if perhaps the call was an accident. Kyle sinks his face further back into his pillow, prepared to hang up as he teeters anxiously on that brief window of time where he’ll be able to fall back asleep with relative ease. “H-Hello, Stan? Stan?”

A few more seconds of silence seem to confirm his pocket-dial theory, and Kyle hovers his thumb over the _end call_ function when he hears a panting like someone out of breath.

“…Kyle?” Stan’s voice cuts through on the other end, so minute a sound that Kyle almost misses it. When Stan speaks, he props himself up in bed on his elbow, phone pressed to his ear, and swings his head over to check his clock. The hazy flashing of light taunts him with their lack of urgency: 2:34 a.m.

“K-Kyle…” He repeats in the same strained tone.

“Dude,” Kyle moans, “it’s two in the morning, why are you calling me?”

“I-I’m sorry, were, uh…were you, um…sleeping?”

Kyle pinches the bridge of his nose. His first instinct is to be sarcastic, but he lacks the subtlety for it as this hour. “Yeah, I was sleeping, Stan. I have my debate competition in the morning.”

Through the speaker, Kyle can hear Stan groan with himself and begin to stutter, slurring all the while at break-neck speed. “Dude, fuck, I totally forgot, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine, it’s—”

“I-I just, I’m just, like, kinda…I don’t know, dude…”

“Stan, it’s okay, what—”

“I shouldn’t have called you, I’m s—”

“No, no,” Kyle coos, reassuring him. He’s awake enough now for the stress in Stan’s voice to become resonant to him. “It’s okay. Do you…do you, like, need something?”

Stan sighs into the phone, defeated, as if he already regrets the entire call in the span of a minute. “Could…could you, uh, pick me up?”

Kyle scoffs in shock, double-checking his clock to make sure he’s as outraged as he should be. “Pick you up? Stan, it’s two in—”

“I know, Kyle, I know. I’m sorry.”

In his bed, Kyle sits up half-way leaning on both elbows. It’s not as if this hasn’t become a somewhat more frequent occurrence, but it never came as less of an annoyance. But Stan wouldn’t have called him unless he really needed it. He lets out a small breath before asking his next question, though he already knows the answer. “Are you drunk?”

Without hearing it, much less seeing it, Kyle can feel Stan nodding his head in shame. “Y…yeah.”

Neither of them speak for a few moments. Stan doesn’t know what to say to dull the embarrassment he now feels, and though he would never say it, he knows that Kyle is quietly disappointed in him.

“Well, where are you?” Kyle asks, perched on the edge of his bed, already slipping on a pair of socks and his boots. “Where am I picking you up?”

“Uh…Bailey.”

In his surprise, Kyle half-shouts before he remembers the time. “Bailey?” he hushes. “Why the hell are you all the way in Bailey?!”

“I was at Clyde’s with all of them earlier, Craig and those guys, like, all of them, then we all – ah – went to this big party in Bailey, but I walked away to... I-I’m like, outside this abandoned gas station or something.”

Kyle shook his head and huffed with a silent laugh. He’s beyond frustration at this point. That’s Stan’s description of his location: Was at Clyde’s, now in Bailey, at an abandoned gas station. Or something.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to wherever that party is? It looks pretty bad out, dude.” _Plus, you could, y’know, maybe give me an actual address_ , he thinks.

“No, I’m fine here. I’ll just wait for you.”

Kyle nods, rubbing his eye with the palm of his hand. “Okay, if you say so. I’ll be there soon, wherever it is.”

“…Kyle?”

“Yeah?”

Kyle looks around for his ushanka in the dark as he awaits Stan’s next words, but nothing comes once he finds it hanging off his desk chair. He stands still, inquisitive, waiting. “Yeah, Stan?”

A few tense seconds pass before Stan speaks again. “N-nothing. It’s uh, nothing…thank you, Kyle.”

“No problem, Stan.”

Kyle’s hand hovers over his doorknob, careful as to not even so much as touch it with too much force, lest his mother leap out of bed and prevent him from leaving in a grandiose and melodramatic spectacle. Once his hand is clasped around it, he turns his wrist in the slowest possible manner. Each ear is on full alert to hear if he’s woken anyone with his complete and utter silence. He breathes a sigh of relief once the knob is fully turned. Next begins the process of easing the door wide enough for him to squeak his thin frame through the gap. As his left foot touches the edge of the outside wall, he sharply sucks in his breath and levitates into the hallway. Once his door is closed, he remembers to breathe again, and slinks alongside the wall to the stairway, and with the utmost care in the world, silently side-steps down the creaky wooden staircase. A particular noisy step threatens his progress, and as he listens to it grate beneath his weight, his blood turns to ice. He watches the top of the stairs for a full minute before he continues downward.

He relaxes once he touches down into the living room, knowing he’s almost safe, and retrieves his jacket from the coat rack, slipping it comfortably over himself and digging with care to retrieve his car keys from the front pocket. He thinks of Stan sitting alone and heavily drunk in the cold during his ten-minute espionage, and hurries with a bit more urgency outside—still incredibly careful to shut the door with discretion.

As he climbs into his car parked on the street, he turns the ignition with little, though, still some, apprehension.

**

Stan looks down at his phone after he’s hung up with Kyle, and he keeps looking. All he does is read Kyle’s name over and over. Kyle. Kyle. He thinks about Kyle slinking out of his warm bed and his warm house out into inclement weather to rescue him again. Part of him keeps staring at his name because his vision isn’t focused enough to figure out how to leave his call log. He shoves his phone out of sight all together, back into his pocket and twiddles his fingers into the lint collecting in the cloth. Without the distraction, he feels the full weight of his inebriation all at once: his head feels both heavy and light at the same time, as if half of him is full of rocks and the other full of helium. There’s a buzzing between his ears like television static, fuzzy and grating. Every move of his body feels as if he’s not actually doing it, as if he’s simply watching himself do it from the outside, like an old VCR tape where the audio and the video aren’t quite synced up. He rocks on his heels, shivering, rubbing his hands to soothe himself. Over his shoulder, he tries to get a fuller look at his surroundings: graffiti, broken windows, and rusting overhead, nondescript and out of sight.

From behind the adjacent building, he spots a portly racoon skirting in the snow. Making sure not to lose his balance, he turns on his heel to huddle toward it. As it notices Stan’s presence, he can see it start to panic. Stan freezes as best he can so as not to startle it any further, faintly lifting his hands. “C-C’mere buddy. It’s okay, I’m not gonna hurt you.” The racoon stares at Stan with its tiny, shadowed eyes, twitching its nose and twiddling its claws. “It’s okay,” Stan murmurs, “I’m a friend.” The racoon cautiously scampers forward bit by bit, but remains a sizeable distance away. Stan pats his pockets and realizes he has nothing to offer it, and makes delicate steps toward a trash can a few feet away. Before he reaches inside, he leans on it for a minute to take a breath. He shouldn’t have drank so much. He really, really shouldn’t have drank so much. His stomach is in knots, flipping inside him and rattling his whole body, making his knees clatter. With one more breath he notices the racoon has sat itself less than a foot away, giving its nose an inquisitive twitch. “I’ll find something for ya, buddy.” Wincing as he immediately touches something sticky and fleshy, he reaches further in, knocking through empty pop cans and paper bags until he feels a half-eaten sandwich wrapped in plastic. “Here you go.”

Putting the wrap back into the garbage, he tosses the sandwich halfway between them, and watches as the racoon scampers toward the tiny morsel and quickly scoops it into its paws. Stan smiles, his heart fluttering as he awaits the critter’s approval of his selection from the trash. It pecks at the bread ravenously before turning back to take cover in the alley.

As quick as his mood had been elevated by helping the hungry animal, he soon returns to the same empty nagging in his chest as he watches it leave. With the help of the can’s rim, he’s able to keep himself steady. Every vein in his head is pulsing as if it’s the last time they’ll do so. He shuts his eyes, but this only makes his dizziness worse, and he wraps his arms around his stomach to quell his nausea. _I shouldn’t have left_. He decides he’s going to do what Kyle told him: he’ll walk back to the party and wait for him there. He doesn’t really want to see his friends in there after the scene he made about wanting to go, but he could at least wait on the porch, and sneak inside from time to time to warm himself up. It’ll be a while before Kyle arrives.

Fingers shaking, he digs into his pocket to retrieve his phone. As he turns on the screen, prepared to call, it wavers in his fingertips and slips from his hand, landing at the perfect angle on the bottom left corner to shoot a small, splintering crack in the glass as well as pop off its back cover. “Shit!” he hisses, “Aw – aww, _fuck_.” Down on his knees, he pats through the snow to retrieve the ejected battery, his fingers numb and aching from the cold as he mutters all the while about what a fucking idiot he is. When he stumbles upon it and quickly removes it from the snow, shaking off the ice, he rubs it into his jacket and hopes that someone, something, somewhere in the universe will have decided he could use a break tonight. He struggles to press it back into place the right way, unable to match up the identical shapes exactly as if he were forcing a square peg in a round hole. Concentrating as best he can, it clicks into place with some give, and without even bothering with the backing, he attempts to turn it on. Nothing. Of course, considering there’s little else going his way, he’s not all that surprised. Tucking his phone angrily back into his pocket, he lowers himself all the way down to the ground. Even if it wasn’t to tell him he was going back, he just wishes he could hear Kyle’s voice. He hides his head into folded arms and prepares to wait. He doesn’t even know if he could find his way back, anyway.

**

Kyle strives to keep his eyes open, gripping to the steering wheel with such intensity that his knuckles begin to ache. He yawns into his shoulder. The combination of the heat flowing in his direction and the way his headlights have their light absorbed by the gray, muddled slush in the road makes him wish he were still in his bed. He glimpses at the clock. Without reading the time, he already feels as if he’s been driving all night.

Bailey isn’t terribly far; as small towns go, South Park is small as they come, connected to its neighbor by a few miles of decrepit pavement cutting through the woods. Feeling the presence of black ice on the road, he gently pumps his breaks, and laments the fact that he’ll have to drive even slower that he already was. Within fifteen minutes, he’s passing by the city limits of South Park, rolling his eyes at the stupid wooden sign that serves as the only official proof that they’re even on the map.

Coniferous trees line each side of the metal railing on the road, shrouding the path from the glimmers of moonlight that dawn through the clouds, enveloping everything around it in an eerie yet oddly pretty blackness. Settling in for the long, boring drive further down the road, he realizes just how little of an idea he has of where Stan even is. All he recalls from the phone call with him, tripping and stumbling over the words trapped in his marble-mouth, is that he was at some party, and for some reason chose to leave it. To a gas station. An abandoned gas station, of all places. He slows to a safe twenty, and fishes for his phone in his pants pocket, redialing Stan. As he waits for the lack of service to process his call, he hopes that he can convince him to walk back to whatever stranger’s house he was just at. 

Before he can begin to rehearse his plea, he’s sent automatically to Stan’s simple voicemail: _Hey, this is Stan, sorry I missed you, but leave a message and I’ll try to get back to you soon_. Kyle releases an exasperated groan, mumbling, “C’mon dude, you just called me,” before trying again, stonewalled by the same immediate message again. _Hey, this is Stan, sorry I missed you, but leave a message and I’ll try to get back to you soon_. The beep interrupts his thoughts, and for some reason, he tries to come up with something to say.

Unsure of what to do next, he nibbles at his lip and remembers Stan saying he was with Clyde. With the utmost caution, glancing down for only a second or two at a time as he flips through his contacts, he tries to decide between Craig’s gang which of them would be the most receptive to his call at this hour, as well as the most helpful. After next to no deliberation, he settles for Token. In middle school, the two of them spent half of their summer at a camp for gifted STEM students in Denver at the behest of their parents, bonding over their mutual desire not to be there, and have been rather friendly ever since.

 As he hits the third ring, he worries that maybe Token isn’t with them; he’ll disrupt his night as Stan did his, or he’ll be explaining to him tomorrow why he called at nearly three in the morning. He’s not too keen on either of these events. As the fifth ring rolls, he’s directed to Token’s voicemail and briskly hangs up to avoid having any of his mutterings caught on the recording. He has neither the time nor the patience to lead a one-man search and rescue through all of Bailey, even for Stan, and Kyle releases all the air in his lungs with a heavy, prolonged sigh. His next choice is Clyde, hoping he’s not as drunk as Stan was when he called him, though knowing Clyde, it’s a given.

Within seconds of hanging up the call, his phone begins to buzz in his hand. Token is calling him back, and Kyles’s prepared to begin apologizing the moment he answers.

“ _Kyyyyle_! Man, what’s good?”

Token’s voice is tipsy and good-humored, and between the roaring of other peoples’ laughter and the heavy reverberation of music, Kyle leans the phone slightly off his ear to avoid blowing out his eardrums. He knows he isn’t a heavy drinker, or even that much of a party-goer, but he’s been known to indulge at the prodding of Craig and Clyde, who Kyle affectionately referred to in private as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

“Hey, Token. How’re you?”

“Good, man, good! Where’re you at right now?”

“Well, that’s why I—”

Kyle’s sentence is interrupted when Craig can be heard inspecting who it is that he’s talking to. Muffled by what he assumes is Token’s hand over the phone, he can hear him say _It’s Kyle, dude_ , causing Craig to groan as he’s pushed back out of the conversation. Kyle rolls his eyes.

“Sorry about that,” Token huffs. “He’s just being a dick.”

“Yeah, no, it’s fine, but anyway, that’s why I was calling you, be—”

“You were calling about Craig?”

“No, no, no, that’s—”

“Why didn’t you just call Craig, then?”

“No – God – Token,” Kyle shakes his head, backtracking their conversation before Token gets lost in it. “I’m _not_ calling about Craig.”

“Oh, well, uh, what’s up, man? You sound stressed out, you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, I’m calling because Stan called me a little while ago.”

“ _Ohhh!_ Yeah, man, Stan…we were all having a good time, but Stan disappeared for, like, half an hour, and when he came back he was all upset about somethin’ and wanted to leave.”

“Well, what was he upset about?”

Token laughingly scoffs into the phone. “I have no fuckin’ clue dude, he wouldn’t tell me. He just kept saying he wanted to leave, he wanted to leave, but none of us were good enough to drive, so he said he was just…gonna, like, walk?”

“And you guys just let him leave?”

“I offered to call him a ride, but he insisted on walking.”

Wedging the phone between his shoulder and cheek, Kyle palms the side of his face. At this point he’s frustrated almost equally with Token’s flippant disregard for his safety as he is with Stan’s theatrical mood swings. Detecting Kyle’s disapproving silence, he quickly supplements his answer. “I told him not to go,” Token says very matter-of fact, almost unfazed. He pauses to take a drink. As he finishes his sip he begins to bridge the two pieces of information. “Wait, is that why you’re calling?”

“Yeah,” Kyle sighs. “He called me from a gas station.”

“He did?”

“Yeah.” He pauses to focus on his driving around a sudden bend in the road, switching his high beams on before continuing the conversation.

“But that’s all he would tell me, I don’t exactly know where he is and for some reason I can’t get through to him now, I was hoping you could give me the address of where you guys are at so I at least have a general idea of where the hell it is that I’m going.”

“Yeah, dude, no problem, it’s—wait. Hold on.”

Token covers the receiver again but it doesn’t prevent Kyle from hearing him shout, _Ey, Craig…Craig! What’s the address of this place, man? … I don’t fuckin’ know, that’s why I’m askin’ you! … Well, does Clyde know?_

Kyle pinches the bridge of his nose, a habit he’s aware he picked up from Stan, and removes the phone from his shoulder and knocks it against his temple. Token’s voice is out of reach of the speaker, and he makes a conscious effort to not let grogginess rile up his irritability. The clock on his dashboard reads just after three.

When Token can be heard again, he lets out a couple of steady gasps for air. “Yo, Kyle, I got the address.”

“What is it?”

“435 Willow Drive. You said he walked to a convenience store?”

“A gas station, yeah, that’s what he said.”

“I remember we, um, we passed one on the way here, it was a couple blocks from here, like, behind this cluster of houses, but it was all broken down and shit, so I don’t know if that’s useful to you.”

“That’s probably where he is. He said it looked worn out.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I hope you find him. He was pretty drunk, I feel kind of bad that I let him leave now,” Token muffles, a twinge of guilt in his voice.

“I’m sure he’s all right. I think I’m getting pretty close.”

“Does he do this a lot?”

“No, not—well, kind of.”

The two of them sit on this unwilling revelation, neither of them sure what to say next until an incredibly plastered Clyde globs onto Token’s shoulder and yells, _Dude, Token, you missed it, I just did, like, four shots off this chick, man! C’mon, what are you doing?!_

“Sorry, Kyle, I’m—”

“It’s all good, man,” he laughs, “have fun. Thanks for the help, I appreciate it.”

“No problem, Kyle.”

Having hung up with Token, Kyle slips his phone into the center console and contemplates on what he said earlier. _I’m sure he’s all right…yeah, he’s all right. He’s okay. He’s fine._ His paranoia is beginning to get the better of him. No matter how many times he says it to himself, _he’s okay, he’s fine, I’m almost there_ , there’s still the lingering thought of Stan wandering off again, being hurt, being cold and sick and wondering where his is, why he isn’t there yet, lying face down in the snow, too weak to lift himself or roll over, dying from suffocation or hypothermia or alcohol poisoning, whichever is more painful as that would simply be his luck. He wishes he could call him. He’s tempted to, even though he knows he won’t get through, just to hear his message again. He nips at his thumbnail, laying his foot a little heavier on the gas.

As he winds through the upscale neighborhood, marveling at how large and expensive the houses all appear, he keeps an eye peeled for the exit. The map on his phone was unhelpful, and listed no such gas station in the vicinity, and at this point he was relying solely on what Token had told him—there was one somewhere behind that cluster of houses. He felt too tired to think straight, like there was an obvious solution he was missing somewhere but simply couldn’t find, and as he pulled out back onto the road, he began to worry. _What if Stan isn’t there_? He had tried calling, again, and received nothing, again.

Just up ahead of an unusually long red light, he spots a collection of bright red station pumps. They’re easy to almost miss, with only one flickering streetlight casting down on them. His heartbeat pounds in his throat, and he’s tempted to run this light—he’s been stuck here for almost two full minutes. The traffic signal only stares back at him, mocking him. He glances in all directions of the intersection and sees he’s all alone, no glimpse of headlights to be found in the long stretch of night. He grinds the leather of the steering wheel in his hands. “Ugh, I’m the only person on the road, _go,_ goddammit!” The fact that he’s less than a hundred feet from Stan’s probable location, waiting in agony for Kyle to arrive, is pissing him off to no end. And here he is, stuck at a fucking light. “Screw it,” he whispers, but before he can actually enjoy the thrill of breaking the law, as minor as it may be, the light finally flashes green. “Oh, _fuck you_ ,” he mumbles under his breath.

Kyle flings his belt off and leaps from his car, almost losing his balance on a hidden patch of ice. With the sparse light of the lamppost down the street, he spots Stan with his arms laid over his knees, head bowed down, trembling with reckless abandon. Easing through the slush on the ground, and guided by the hood of his car, Kyle jogs over to him and settles a hand on his shoulder.

“Stan?”

Struggling to raise his head, he looks at Kyle with the same soft, sad eyes of an abandoned puppy with nowhere left to go, and tries to say his name only to realize he couldn’t stop the chattering of his teeth. Bending over slightly, Kyle cups his chin in his hand and inspects his face, batting away at the droplets of snow perched on his eyelashes. “Jesus, dude,” he whispers. “I told you to go back. Look at you. You look like hell.”

Kyle watches Stan’s eyes divert downward, glistening in the faintness of the street light. He exhales. Crouching down to his level, he sneaks his arms under his, hooking him like a fish and heaving him upward, realizing with the intensity that Stan gripped to his jacket and leaned on him for support that now wasn’t exactly the time for one of his loving lashings. “C’mon, dude,” Kyle whispers. “Let’s get you home.”

Stan sits patient in the passenger seat awaiting the loving embrace of central heating. He no longer just feels frozen, but also uncomfortably wet. As he turns to watch Kyle slip into the driver’s seat, he flinches when he’s suddenly only wearing a t-shirt. Kyle nonchalantly turns the ignition, blasting the heat to its highest setting as he passes his bundled-up jacket to him from under his arm. “Here,” he mutters, “put this on. I don’t want you to be cold.” Stan looks to the jacket and stares for what seems like an inordinate amount of time before he looks back up. Kyle shoves it further in his direction with a kind insistence, and helps him slip off his heavy coat. As he maneuvers his arms through the sleeves, he realizes it’s a bit snug, but is a drastic difference that he immediately appreciates. With a sigh of relief, he burrows deeply into the seat and allows himself to rest his eyes, heavy with exhaustion. “This too,” he hears, and before he knows what’s happening, his puffball hat is yanked from his head and tossed into the backseat as well. He feels Kyle loom over him out of his seat, preparing to buckle him in as if he were his own sleepy child on the way home from a long and exciting day at the zoo, or the amusement park, or perhaps even the aquarium, instead of the freshly eighteen-year-old he was previously engaged in an overwhelming night of underage drinking and self-loathing. He tries his hardest to pretend he’s in any of the former scenarios.

Neither of them speak for the first few minutes. Stan watches the buildings blend into an indiscernible mess, the neutral grays and browns of an unfamiliar town making him woozy and light-headed. Each of them knows the conversation that is inevitably going to take place in this car, but they make an unspoken agreement to delay it for even the shortest while. Kyle oscillates the radio between NPR and an old hip-hop station and keeps the volume to a minimum.

Stan moans, gesticulating his hand in an acerbic way. “Go ahead.”

Kyle takes a second to glance around before following up with, “With what?”

“I know what you—” Stan interrupts himself by sharply sucking in air. “…I know what you wanna say. So say it. Seriously, just say it.”

“Well, if you know what I’m going to say, why do I need to say it?”

Stan shifts from his reclined position to sitting upright in his seat and clears his throat. He doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to dance around Kyle’s effortless skill in entrapping him in his own words—he just wants to be yelled at and get it over with so he can space out for the rest of the drive. He drags his hands across his eyes, distressed by his own vertigo. “Because you say it every time,” he mutters. Stan aimlessly points his finger in Kyle’s direction. “Y’know, you and Wendy are exactly the goddamn same.”

“In what way?”

“You both think you know everything, fuckin’ know-it-alls.”

Kyle chuckles, undisturbed by his criticism because he can tell there’s no real malice behind it. Besides, Stan secretly loved that he was a know-it-all, especially since it kept him at a solid B in Physics all last year. “You make it sound like I’m trying to stage an intervention for you,” he says.

“It kinda feels that way.”

“Well, I’m not.”

Stan watches as Kyle avoids even looking at him, only concerned with finding their way home back the way he came. The way the words, _Well, I’m not,_ roll off his tongue without a moment of hesitation makes him feel as if he’s hurt Kyle, though it wasn’t his intention. At least, not really. He couldn’t decide if he’d ever actually _seen_ Kyle in the t-shirt he was currently wearing. “I just wish you would drink less, is all.”

“Oh, my god,” Stan groans, slouching forward. “I’m not some fifty-year old truck driver with a failing liver, dude—I’m fine.”

“Stan,” Kyle says. “You keep all those empty bottles in your room, in your closet, under your bed—every time I’m there, there’s more. This is – what – the fourth time in two months I’ve had to come get you?”

“Remind me not to call you next time,” he mumbles, leaning swiftly near Kyle’s ear. His breath is hot, moist and slightly uncomfortable; Stan’s apparent lack of depth perception is beginning to stress Kyle out. “That’s the thing,” he says, “I don’t want there to _be_ a next time, I don’t like—”

“Oh, I’m sorry I’m not like you, Kyle,” Stan interrupts, raising his voice. His fists are balled up and resting on his thighs. “Sorry I can’t just rationalize all my fuckin’ problems away.”

“I’m not like that!”

“You absolutely fuckin’ are, you’re like a goddamn robot.”

“Where the hell is this coming from?”

“You have no feelings, none whatsoever.” Stan slurs with a brash grin, and proceeds to poke a finger in the general vicinity of where he thinks Kyle’s heart is; the sight of his bitter, indignant panting is oddly satisfying, now that he _is_ trying to hurt him. He knows he’s succeeded as he listens to Kyle’s voice crack, dumbstruck with what to say.

“I-I have feelings—I have a lot of feelings, goddammit!”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry, you’re right Kyle,” he scowls into the rearview mirror, doing whatever it takes to get Kyle to look him in the eye, since he refuses to glance away from the road and give Stan the attention he commands. “You do have feelings, of course you have feelings! You have _two_ feelings! Anger,” he sings, counting limply on his fingertips, “aaaand anger. Just..a big ball of anger.” He pinches Kyle’s cheek before his hand is righteously smacked away.

Kyle consoles himself as he withdraws his initially response— _Fuck you, Stan, I’m not always angry_ —from his thoughts, fearful of providing Stan’s pointless prodding any proof. It seems to be an uneven split as to whether Stan will be a loving or an irate drunk. Kyle was rarely fortunate enough to pick up the benevolent, thoughtful Stan who would climb in his car and immediately reach out to hug him, to beam at him with that strikingly handsome yet boyishly charming smile of his, the Stan who would shower him with affection, curl his hair in his finger and compliment it and tell him how smart he was and wondering how it was possible he could have a best friend like Kyle. It had been months. He missed it immensely. “I wish you would stop doing this,” he says.

“Why do you even care how much I drink?”

“Because I’m worried about you, Stan!”

“Well, don’t be! ‘Cos I’m _fine!_ ”

His voice rattles as he halts just short of yelling, trying to convince them both that his words are true. The stale air in the car is thick with animosity. Stan’s anger doesn’t liberate him the way he imagines it would. It sits in his chest like murky sludge, bogging down in his extremities and consuming him as he watches Kyle chew at his lip. It was his own special little tick, to chew on his lip when he was nervous or stressed, and often it was accompanied by nail biting or picking sometime after. Stan always thought it was sweet in a disgusting sort of way. He understands what this means: damage control has set in, and Kyle is searching very deliberately for the correct set of words and phrases to avoid upsetting Stan any further in an excellent feat of mental acrobatics. But after a minute, nothing comes out of his mouth. He only digs his hands around in the center console again, and retrieves a well-worn and well-hidden pack of cigarettes. Laying the pack on his thigh, Kyle very carefully slides both a cigarette and lighter from inside and purses it between his lips, giving pause only to ask, “Do you mind if I smoke?” though, it’s not really a question. Stan nods his head, giving his blessing.

Kyle puffs and inhales deeply, holding every bit of smoke in his lungs that he’s physically capable of, cracking his window slightly before exhaling. Not that he did it all that often, but he was always cautious about smoking in front of Stan; he hadn’t had an asthma attack since they were in third grade, and he insists that he’s simply ‘grown out of it,’ but it still worried Kyle. Despite his better judgement, and his desire not to share this simple, fleeting pleasure, when Stan leans over and asks for a hit, he lets him. He holds it out for him to take, but Stan simply latches onto the filter instead, breathing in as he feels Kyle’s thin, frigid fingers on his lips.

“Ugh, you still smoke Newports?” he whines, exhaling through his nose.

“What’s wrong with Newports?”

“Menthols are for pussies.”

Stan’s light teasing is an appreciated break from being berated, and he smiles at Kyle before slumping back into his seat. He forgets in an instant what it was that he had just said to Kyle, but knows by the sad way he sits and checks on him out of the corner of his eye that it wasn’t good. He can tell what’s coming next and he graciously accepts his fate, a prisoner waiting for execution.

“Token said you left because you were upset about something,” he prompts. Stan returns to staring out the window without acknowledging his words, and Kyle wonders if he even heard him. “Do you, uh…do you want to talk about it?”

He grumbles into his palm. “Not really. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before.”

“Doesn’t mean it won’t help you to talk about it.”

Stan’s not entirely sure whether he’s even physically capable of explaining all of this to Kyle. It seems such a monstrous amount of agony to compartmentalize into a half-hour car ride, but resolves to try to do so anyway, drawing in his breath. “It’s just…just, like, this fuckin’ day, dude.”

“I got into a fight with Wendy today. She told me that she wanted to…” His voice trails, and he clears his throat before speaking again. “To…y’know, take a break again. I…said some things to her I probably shouldn’t have. Told me she didn’t want to fight and that she would talk to me when I calmed down.”

The words that Stan wants to use, eloquent and scathing and poetic, refuse to spill from his mouth despite their sitting trapped in the back of his throat for weeks, and instead tumble out of him with an inept boorishness, and he wishes he could collect them into his arms and shove them back into his mouth and swallow them whole.

Kyle nods to acknowledge he’s listening. He evenly divides his attention between Stan and the road. He’s not concerned with the particulars of what was said; most of their fights are a recycled version of their previous one, with miniscule details added and different sets of swears. Wendy is always concerned that Stan cares too little about the future of both their relationship and his own life; Stan is always insecure that he’s holding her back and she’ll one day resent him. For two people who care so much about each other, they can’t ever seem to express it without shouting. Why they’re both so concerned about a relationship that will inevitably end is lost on Kyle.

“I knew the guys were going to this party tonight and…I-I don’t know, I just didn’t want to think about it for a while…I was—” Another small, forced breath disrupts him.

“I-I was just gonna have a couple of drinks, but I…well…” Stan rolls his wrist with an open palm, letting the present situation explain itself. “I…called her and told her I was sorry, that she was right. She was upset that I was drinking. Told me that, her words, I only hear her, I don’t _listen_ to her.”

Kyle finds himself in quiet agreement with Wendy, though he knows it’s the last thing Stan wants to hear right now. The end of the story is obvious to him, like a bad B-movie whose story he’s seen a million times before, and he’s not sure whether he should push for Stan to continue. The broad motion of Stan swiping his forearm across his eyes makes him want to pull over and smother him, let Stan weep with into his t-shirt and hold him, to let him confess this devastation only to never speak of it again until it happens ad nauseum in a few short weeks.

Kyle peeks at his face, only to watch the tears pool and drip from his eyes: no quivering lip, no furrowed brow, no heaving shoulders. His face is as stoic as ever with only two identical trails of tears staining his cheeks. “She keeps saying that she doesn’t know how to fix me.”

He dabs the end of his nose on the sleeve’s cusp, forgetting for a minute that he’s not wearing his own jacket until he processes the mild scent of a different yet familiar detergent; The Marshs’ were a mountain spring family, the Broflovskis’ more of a classic lavender. With a few staggered breaths, he twiddles his thumbs in his lap before he can muster the words trapped in his throat. “She thinks we’re only together because, um…w-we’re, like, both afraid of things changing—said she doesn’t know what else to do, that she can’t keep doing this and all that stuff. She wants me to start seeing a therapist again.”

“…Do you think it would help?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know, dude. It didn’t really do much for me last time.”

For years, Stan had suffered quietly with his depression, choosing instead to relegate himself to shutting out the world and self-medicating instead. Shortly before the time of his fifteenth birthday, after a worrying outburst at dinner about wishing he were dead, his mother had begun making him see a therapist at the suggestion of the school counselor. For one hour a week, for a year and a half, Stan would sit in the kitschy, cozy office of a polite albeit pushy forty-something woman, staring at her various degrees and accolades on the wall and watching as she crossed and uncrossed her legs twenty times a minute while prodding him to reveal the key to his dysfunction, guaranteeing she could help if only he would _talk_. There was a vulnerability in giving a stranger a window into his life that Stan couldn’t shake, and for that one hour per week, half of it was spent surveying the floor as she warbled on about the miracles of a persistent attitude and “mindfulness.”

Although it didn’t much help with his depression, it provided him a much-needed respite from his parent’s incessant quarreling as their marriage continued to divulge into an increasingly arduous pastiche of what it once was when he was younger. Over the years, they would have one of their tempestuous shouting matches, the kind other adults in town would whisper about in the grocery store as they contemplate the rising price of fruit and whether chicken breasts were still on sale. They had gone through multiple trial periods of separation, but they always found some insignificant loophole as to why they needed to forgive each other and pretend that nothing had happened, and it always seemed to be for Stan’s sake; they went as far as to monopolize Stan’s therapy until each week became a full-blown family counseling session, punctuated by Stan stepping out anywhere from halfway to ten minutes through, claiming to use the restroom, but disappearing into the lobby to lie in wait. They never seemed to notice his absence.

Shortly after his mother had abruptly stopped scheduling his appointments, Stan’s father moved out for the umpteenth time. After a week had passed, Stan realized he wouldn’t be moving back in. He had taken a job as a seismic interpreter in Boulder, and would drive up every other weekend to see Stan. Often, they would spend the day at Stark’s pond with his uncle. The two men would swallow beers as if they were water, occupying their time by pretending to fish, Stan occasionally receiving a rough slap to the back and the phrase, _“Isn’t this great, Stan? Just you and me?”_ being uttered at least once an hour. At night, Sharon, Randy, and Stan would spend a disquieting meal together, neither of them wanting to confront each other and instead asking Stan the same six questions about school, or about _that nice girl, Wendy?_ or _how’s Kyle and his family?_ until Randy would, like clockwork, announce at just after nine that he had to get going, long drive back, lots of traffic. He and Sharon would share a sad, uncomfortable hug void of any intimacy, as if the two had never really known each other at all. He would pull Stan into his side, tousle his hair, and briskly jog out the door saying he would call tomorrow. Every few days he would try to call, but Stan rarely picked up, and would listen to the voicemails he left even less.

Shelly had been moved out and in school, independently coaxing by on a combination between her own savings and a small loan. All he knew of her now was she had a boyfriend who was somewhat older than her with a stupid name like Brett, or Chad, something like that. She seldom bothered to visit, only spending two days apiece at home during Thanksgiving, and three near Christmas. Though they never grew especially close, she had softened up in her later years, mutely watching over Stan and providing him the small comfort of a brief phone call now and again, lamenting together over the holidays how every single girlfriend their dad brought around was closer to Stan’s age than his own, and about the quiet, seething umbrage of their mother palpating every interaction.

Kyle worries that he’s prodded too much, watching as Stan stops speaking altogether, electing instead to stare back out the window. It seems that no matter what he tries, he can’t get his attention for more than a few minutes at a time. The moment he opens his mouth it’s only a matter of time before Stan muffles his words and clams up. Taking the curve of the road a little slow, he reaches out to give Stan’s shoulder a firm squeeze.

Stan releases a dull moan, placing his fingers over Kyle’s hand as it slinks away. He leans over to delicately hover his head on his upper arm, holding himself up by his elbow on the center compartment. “And it’s just, like…my goddamn parents, dude.” Stan nuzzles further into his arm, his weak, hoarse voice husking lowly through the car. “My dad is driving me nuts. He wants me to come live with him after I graduate, go to university in Boulder.”

Kyle already knows by his tone that it’s out of the question; his dad is enough of an irritation to him now. He often imagined how Stan would ever get along with his father, and his thoughts usually leaned toward the classic trope of shutting out a neglectful parent until years down the road when they dramatically rekindle the relationship. Placing his free arm around him, he rests his wrist on the top of Stan’s head, stroking his fingers tenderly about the tufts of his hair. It seems to relax him.

“He won’t stop bothering my mom about it. It’s really stressing her out.”

“Well, what does she want you to do?”

“I have no clue…I know she’s stopped asking me where I’m applying to because she doesn’t know how to pay for it. I keep applying for scholarships, but none of them…I don’t know.”

Kyle quirks his eyebrow. What could he mean _none_ of them? He distinctly remembers months ago, right as school started again and the leaves were beginning to change—they really were quite pretty this year—he sat on the bleachers of the football field watching Stan practice. Kyle had long given up football, his athletic prowess lying solely in basketball and an acquired appreciation for baseball, sports where he could outwit and outrun his opponents rather than topple them with brute force. It was something Stan truly excelled at; he had always been the darling of the football team, and it was a title he wasn’t keen on giving up. After running their last scrimmage, he watched Stan beam proudly in the face of a college football talent scout and dutifully shake his hand, jogging over to Kyle afterward with the dirt and sweat smudged on his face, in between breaths, “ _Dude, holy shit…this is awesome, this is such good news…oh my god, you’re never gonna believe…”_

“What happened to that recruiter? Th-the one from, uh—”

“I fucked that up,” he utters, emotionless and almost inaudible. “S’not happening.”

Kyle has a delayed reaction, glancing down at him twice before he realizes the remorse on his face. His eyes are empty. Kyle, despite his many questions, knows better than to push it any further and looks to divert.

“Your dad has money,” he says. “Won’t he help you?”

“Not unless I go to school in Boulder.”

“Jesus, dude.”

Stan solemnly nods against his arm. For months, he’s been sitting on this ultimatum with dread. He wonders whether it would be all that bad before settling almost immediately that, yes, it absolutely would be. He misses his father in an insidious, unhealthy sort of way, vying for his attention when he simply has none to give, or at least, none of the attention he wants. At every point, Randy simply misunderstands him; his father doesn’t know him, and he’s not sure he ever really has. The mere thought of his future, and all the financial and emotional uncertainty that comes with it, only exacerbates his foul mood. Dazed and unwell, he leans off Kyle’s arm and curls up in the cloth seat. Kyle gapes at his error and touches a hand to his knee. “Stan…”

“I don’t wanna talk about it anymore,” he mumbles coldly.

Kyle grits his teeth. His chest aches with the knowledge that there’s nothing that he can do, grinding away at his stubborn nature to retribute justice by any means necessary. The sudden fury welling inside him was unsurprising. Of course he was angry, angry with Stan’s father, angry with this unknown recruiter, angry at the world for thinking it could get away with treating his friend in such a manner. Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, he chooses just to drive.  

Stan feels a strange vibration in his pocket, and when he goes to inspects it he finds his phone beginning to come alive, as if it had just decided now that he was worthy of it. He resigns himself to the cracked screen, indulging in his guilt by rereading the sporadic texts his mother had sent him between the calls that he promptly ignored throughout the night.

_12:30: Stanley where r u_

_12:42: Stan honey pleas pick up the phone_

_12:43: *please_

_12:49: Stanley u said u would be home by midnite, where r u????_

_1:07: Why arent u answering me!!_

_1:08: I know u sent my last 2 calls to voice mail Stan, PICK UP_

_1:22: U r really pushing my patience. I am not joking u better call me in the next 5 mins or eldse_

_1:22: *elfse_

_1:23: **ELSE_

_1:47: Youre making me worried. Answer ur phone_

_1:54: Stanley please call me_

**

As the weather begins to settle on the outside, the two of them spend a strained couple of miles in silence. Kyle sleepily yawns while fiddling with the heat, Stan continuing to ignore him in favor of shutting his eyes and wishing to fall asleep. Just as he adjusts himself into his desired position, a sour feeling twists in his gut. He recognizes it in an instant. With a shallow breath, he juts upright in his seat and places a wobbly hand over his stomach. 

“Kyle, you need to pull over.”

The sound of his voice startles Kyle out of his drowsiness. “What, why?”

“Because,” Stan swallows hard, holding a clenched fist to his mouth, “Because I’m about to throw up, I really don’t wanna do it in your car.”

“What?!”

He throws his head in Stan’s direction and scans him up and down, pinpricks of sweat dotting his paling skin. Stan’s eyes are wide as the moon while he jerks haplessly at his belt to free himself. Despite every obvious instinct telling him not to, Kyle slams his foot down on the brakes, feeling the car twist and pull in the sloshy street, using one hand to handle the wheel, and the other to jam his fingers into the belt’s button lock. As the car skids to a stop, each of the boys fling open their doors, leaving Kyle’s car parked in the middle of the street with the brake lights flashing, a monotone ding ringing constantly from the driver’s seat. Stan collapses onto the side of the road, his vision whirring as he struggles to breathe as he retches into the snow-banked grove.

 “Aw, sick dude!” Kyle whips his neck to look away, the vulgar sound of it triggering his own gag reflex. Though he’s seen Stan in this position several times, it never gets any easier having to listen as he steadily vomits, heaving until there’s nothing left inside him.

Stan’s mind runs blank. The only thing he can focus on is the violent contractions in his torso, every muscle sore and tender as he purges himself of the various mistakes of the night. Kyle reluctantly steps toward him inch by inch, extending his arm outward until its caressed on his back, petting him softly to provide what little comfort he can, and takes a knee in the snow at his side. After a few minutes, he signals he’s finished with heavy panting and intermittent spitting.

The gentle touch of Kyle’s hand on his back ripples Stan’s skin with goosebumps, starved for warmth in the mist that hangs between the conifers. There was a way, some unidentifiable quality to the manner in which Kyle could touch him that eclipsed everyone else. He swivels from his knees and rests on his hip, nudging his head into Kyle’s chest; the rise and fall beneath his head as he breathes helps Stan to focus on his own, soothed by the feeling of his body being pulled in closer, his frayed bangs being swept out of his eyes.

“Hold on dude, come here,” Kyle whispers. With him cradled in one arm like a child, Kyle reaches for the end of his shirt and pulls it toward Stan’s mouth to wipe the remnants from his chin, ignoring his purely performative protests. He grimaces at the residue soaking into the fabric and touching his skin. Part of him feels ridiculous, babying him in this way when often Stan was the one who was saving him, trialing through fantastical feats to rescue him that made mere vomit pale in comparison. Between the whistling of the wind and the biting frost of the snow, he listens to Stan’s pathetic, labored breathing. It feels more like returning the favor.

He sits and rubs Stan’s back, fully prepared for him to be sick again, though after several minutes, it doesn’t come. Doting on him, he asks, “Do you feel okay?” Stan shifts further upright in his arms, unable to sit up unassisted without rocking, shaking his head. Kyle frowns at how pitiful he looks. “You think you can stand?”

“C-Can…can we just sit here?”

“Yeah.”

With each of their doors ajar, parked in the middle of the street, Kyle’s car continues its _ding…ding…ding…_

**

After spending an undetermined amount of time on the side of the road, heaving Stan up off the ground and onto him once again, Kyle leads him to the car and gently helps him into the passenger seat. With one last sigh, he starts the car, determined to get home regardless of distance within the next ten minutes as Stan begs him to drive slow. As they re-enter town, Kyle relaxes in his seat. The times wherein which he was actually glad to be back in South Park are few and far-between. Though, there is something about of the town in the dead of night, passing the florist on Main Street and decaying Mall and the empty park behind his house, that makes it seem almost normal. Perhaps it’s that next to no one is conscious at this hour to spoil it.

The relief Kyle feels as he pulls up to Stan’s house is insurmountable, his late-night escapade near over. As he glances at the clock, he’s horrified to see it’s just after four in the morning.

“Oh, my god,” he mutters.

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing. We’re here.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, dude. You’re home.”

Kyle steps out of the driver’s door and tiredly ambles around to the other side. Before he reaches for Stan, he ducks into the backseat and retrieves his sopping jacket and hat and tucks them away in the crook of his arm. He watches as Stan attempts to lift himself out of the car, and scrambles to catch him as he fumbles over his feet, that familiar sting of adrenaline in his hands. He hears Stan mumble, “Thanks,” still rightly drunk. Kyle exhales with a small laugh as he places one of Stan’s arms around his neck, guiding him to the walkway with his other hooked behind his back. 

“Kyle, you’re my best friend,” he whispers.

“I know, dude, I know.”

“No, Kyle, I mean it. You’re my best friend. Like, in the whole world, probably forever. Like until I’m dead and stuff.”

“I know, Stan,” he says wistfully. “You’re my best friend, too.”

“I’m a shitty friend though, aren’t I?”

“No, Stan y—”

“I know I am, and I’m sorry Kyle. I really am.”

Kyle rolls his eyes as he tries to single out his spare key to Stan’s house, jamming three different identical-looking keys into the lock to no avail. He begins to wonder why he has so many keys to start with. Where did they all come from? Kyle doesn’t recognize at least half of them. “Stan,” he says, “you’re a good person, and you’re a good friend. Now help me find which one is yours.”

“I love you, Kyle.”

“I love you too, Stan.”

With none of the help he requested, he eventually pins the correct key between his middle and ring finger, and maneuvers it into the mechanism before he’s able to turn the lock, creaking open the sturdy front door. “Did I tell you I fed a racoon?” Stan quips.

Kyle chuckles quietly as he guides him through the entrance, now keeping him upright with a hand on his chest. “No, you didn’t tell me that.”

“It was – ah – super fat and everything.”

“That’s nice, Stan.”

“I gave it a sandwich I dug out of the garbage.”

“Jesus Christ, dude.”

The two of them stand in the middle of Stan’s living room. Even in the dark, it looks slightly different since Kyle last saw it, as it did every time before, but he’s unable to pinpoint what exactly _it_ is. A different painting on the wall, maybe? It could be that the couch was moved about a foot to the right. In recent years, Sharon had taken to making insignificant arrangements to the décor; Stan explained it as, “a, uh, coping thing, or whatever.” He shakes the thought out of his head, and makes his way to the stairs, unsure of exactly how he’s going to manage up there. As they huddle toward the first steps, he begins to coach him. The entire staircase seems much taller than he remembers. “All right, Stan,” he whispers, “you’re gonna have to work with me here. Watch your step.”

“’Kay.”

By the time he’s on the third step, he can tell this isn’t going to work. For every single-file step Kyle takes upward, Stan’s feet land diagonal in every direction and with half his foot leaning off the edge. The last thing Kyle needs is for him to sustain a massive brain injury, to spill from halfway up the staircase and crack open his head and hemorrhage to death on the carpet in a matter of seconds. He knows the scenario he dreams up to be unlikely but incredibly unsettling nonetheless. “New plan,” he whispers, creeping back down to the previous step. “I’m gonna carry you.”

“ _Pfft_. You can’t lift _me_.”

Kyle glowers at Stan’s newly pompous, charming face. Though Kyle had been the taller one for years and stood at a respectable five feet and ten inches, around the time they left middle school Stan had unexpectedly shot up in height, now towering over him at a lousy six-foot-two; he was also significantly heavier, lean and fit with the broad and muscular frame of archetypal quarterback perfection. Now, getting Stan up the stairs was less about putting him to bed, and more about proving himself. “Yes, I can,” Kyle says.

Stan rolls his shoulder deviously. “Kyle, I would _love_ to see you try.”

With a resilient huff, Kyle leads him back down to the floor. Tapping into the deep recesses of his scout knowledge, sandwiched somewhere between all the mundane arts and crafts, he remembers one of the only days where he learned something truly useful.

Setting his foot between Stan’s legs and shifting his weight, Kyle quickly snatches his right hand with his left, draping it over his shoulder. He can feel Stan tip his head in confusion, trying to force the gears in his brain to turn and determine Kyle’s next move. Ducking down to a squat, Kyle scoops his arm around the back of Stan’s knee, and before Stan can finish his protest of, _Kyle, what are you—_ , he’s cut off by Kyle adjusting his body onto his back and hoisting him into the air. With Stan as comfortably balanced over him as he can be, he grabs his right hand with his own, freeing up his left. For some reason, he’s insanely proud of this accomplishment. Though he’s as heavy as he expected, he doesn’t feel overwhelmed by his weight and can saunter toward the staircase with relative ease, Stan in tow moaning and wailing.

“H-holy shit, Kyle!”

“ _Shh_! You’re gonna wake your mom.”

“O-oh, my god, Kyle, p-please don’t drop me.”

“I’m not gonna drop you,” Kyle hushes, clasping his hand as tight as he can onto Stan.

“Oh, fuck, I-I really don’t like this.”

“God, how did you even manage to walk from that party?”

“Honestly, I-I don’t know.”

“Goddamn, dude.”

“A-Are you holding onto the railing?”

“Yeah, relax, you’re not going to fall.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

As quickly as Stan had accepted his safety, Kyle is crossing the threshold into the upstairs hallway. He makes sure to take quite a few steps forward before he begins to lower Stan back to the ground, letting out a small grunt as he does so. Stan’s feet are wobbly as he touches down and he clings to Kyle’s shoulder without any intention of letting go. He feels as if he’s in an entirely different plane on earth where gravity is heavier. Kyle grins with self-satisfaction as Stan peers toward the staircase, pointing at it weakly. “Did you really just fuckin’ carry me up the goddamn stairs?”

“I told you I could.”

“Holy shit, dude,” he beams, laughing nervously.

Kyle directs him down the hall and passes by his room. Stan turns his head, and before he can say anything, provides the explanation for him. “Bathroom first,” he says. “The last thing I need is for you to piss your bed.”

“I’m not eight, Kyle,” Stan chides, “I’m not gonna wet my bed.”

“Just do it.”

Leading him through the already open door, he flicks on the light and lets Stan amble through, barely shutting the door behind him and leaving it slightly open. Kyle leans up against the wall outside ready to assist if need be. “You can pee on your own, right? I don’t need to hold your dick for you, do I?”

He can feel Stan smirk through the door, followed by a cheeky, “Fuck you, Kyle.”

Remembering that his mother’s bedroom is less than a few feet away, he puts much more stake in keeping his voice low, hiking his tone only high enough so that he can hear himself, and in turn be heard, over the sound of Stan’s disproportionately long urinating. “Also, wash your mouth out while you’re in there, but don’t brush your teeth. It’ll strip away at your enamel.”

He rolls his eyes while Stan mumbles something about him being, “a goddamn dentist,” as he shuffles around, taking longer than Kyle would like. He hears the toilet flush and the spurting of the faucet, Stan lathering his hands in a generous amount of soap before it’s rinsed away, the sound of water being cupped in his hands and splashed to his face, and finally ending with the swishing and spitting of it down the drain. With the light turned back off, he hangs against the door frame and looks to Kyle with bloodshot eyes. Without saying a word, the two of them lean back onto each other, hip to hip, wandering into Stan’s bedroom.  

It’s been a while since Kyle has been in Stan’s room for more than an hour or two at a time; after his parent’s divorce, he preferred to spend as much time as he possibly could outside of his house, meaning all their sleepovers, which they still shamelessly participated in, almost always were at Kyle’s. Analyzing the familiar posters and pictures, he hears Stan plop on the edge of the bed, groaning softly as he lies on his back. If Kyle wasn’t there he would be fully prepared to fall asleep this way: half of his body hanging off the bed, fully dressed. He holds back another groan as Kyle delicately pulls him upright, slipping off his jacket. “You want your shirt on or off?” he asks.

“Off, please,” Stan says softly. He relaxes while Kyle drags his shirt up his back and over his head, laying it neatly on the back of his desk chair along with both of their jackets and Stan’s hat. Kyle takes a knee and neatly begins to undo the knots of his shoes; part of Stan feels as if he should be ashamed of his incoordination, not even able to kick off his own shoes, but far be it from him to refuse placating Kyle’s incessant compulsion to take care of him. When his socks come off, his jeans come next, followed by Kyle pulling back the covers as he sprawls beneath them and against the wall, laying it gently up to his chest. “Do you need anything?” he asks.

“Nah, I’m good.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Stan coos. “I’m good.”

Kyle takes a step back and lets out a relieved sigh, reveling in the image of Stan safe and comfortable and warm in his bed as if he were a beloved piece of art he had spent his entire life cultivating. He stands rubbing his hands a few times before he remembers the time. “I should probably go,” he says. “I have…three hours before I need to be up.”

“Well…you could just stay,” Stan suggests. “You can just sleep here, leave in the morning.”

“What do I do when my mom gets up and realizes I’m not there?”

“I don’t know, dude—you live like, literally a minute away, just, like, tell her you had something you needed to take care of, or something.”

Kyle mulls over the idea, truthfully not caring about the consequences either way. “…I _am_ really tired.”

Stan happily pats the bed. “Plenty of room,” he says, though there isn’t really in his twin bed, but he knows Kyle doesn’t mind. There had never been any strangeness between them about being physical; regardless of a certain irritant constantly deriding them at the bus stop, Stan had never been afraid to pull Kyle in for a hug, to grab hold of his hand for comfort or crawl into his bed or just stand at his side, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. He enjoyed it quite a lot, actually.

Kyle slips out of his boots and lets his pants fall to the floor, nudging them near the night-table while setting his hat on top of it. After a forceful yawn, he shakes some of the coils from his disheveled hair loose before settling in next to Stan. He turns in the bed to face him, the two of them smiling warmly at each other, consumed by fatigue.

“Sorry I snapped at you in the car,” Stan says weakly, his throat still stinging and raw. Kyle waves his hand. “It’s fine. I shouldn’t have brought it up again.”

“Nah, I wanted to talk, I just…freaked out a little.”

Kyle reaches out his hand to move several threads of hair from his face, giving him access to the same sad eyes he’s become accustomed to, Stan and his habit of self-flagellation for minor crimes. He knew he neither wanted nor accepted his pity, but it was hard to hide, and he was hopeful that the shadows in the room could help conceal his concern. “Kyle?” Stan asks.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember last year?”

“Do I…like—what part of it?”

“When I was admitted.”

He says it so flatly that Kyle’s breath hitches in his throat. It had been a while since he thought about it, preferring instead to force the memory away whenever it crept back into his head. It sends a cold quiver through his spine. “Yes,” he murmurs. “I remember.”

“I remember you crying in the ambulance.”

“Yeah. I was.”

“You were crying harder than my mom.”

“I really thought you were going to die.”

“I thought I was too.”

Stan can see the same panic returning to Kyle’s face, like he keeps ripping open a fresh wound and forcing it to bleed instead of letting it heal and fade. He searches around in the dark for his hand and gives it a gentle squeeze, immediately returned. “Did you tell anyone other than the guys where I was?”

“I didn’t tell anyone, Stan.”

**

Kyle remembered that next day at the bus stop, being the last one to arrive. Kenny was huddled over by Cartman and his phone, both exclaiming excitedly over something—he doesn’t remember. Butter was also there that day, as he had taken to waiting with them for the bus around that time. He stood in the exact spot he always did, but could only stare at the empty patch next to him. In the thirteen hours since Stan had been at the hospital, Kyle had neither slept nor eaten, despite the hourly encouragements of his mother pleading, _Bubalah, please, you need to eat something!_ All he could do was play the image in his head.

When he showed up to the bus stop, it was in the same clothes, Stan’s blood and spit stained into the fabric of his jacket and all. He was dehydrated, starving, and barely lucid. After being formally greeted by Kenny and Butters, they immediately asked if he was all right, that he didn’t look so good before Cartman chimed in, “Where’s Stan? You two fags always walk here together.” The mere mention of his name, only made worse by the callous, disgusting nature of Cartman’s pure existence, very nearly sent him into hysterics. It took every ounce of self-control to force anything at all to come. “Sick,” he muttered. “Flu.”

It seemed to appease them, as they very quickly went back to gushing over the irritating video droning on Cartman’s phone. Kyle sat by himself on the bus, lingering his fingers over the empty seat next to him where any other day he would be giving Stan last minute answers to his math homework, or explaining the last half of the book they were reading in English that Stan swore he just didn’t have time to get to, or making plans to do something, go somewhere on the weekend and they would laugh about a new video game or something on television, or he would be soothing Stan’s knee and mewing softly to him in consolation, helping him keep from weeping on a crowded bus where they would share a tender moment amidst the chaos and the loudness of their peers, because this seat on the bus was theirs and no one else’s, and thus, no one else mattered.

It was impossible for him to concentrate when he was given a quiz first thing in calculus; he turned it in blank, not even remembering if he wrote his own name. When he got to English, one of the only two classes he shared with Stan that semester, his stomach turned and crumpled inside him as their teacher took roll, calling his name without looking up: “Stan…Stan…is Stan not here today?” Various kids shrugged and said they hadn’t seen him, he might be sick, or he’s probably skipping again, but they all focused in on the empty desk one row ahead of Kyle and to the right. She would mark a large _X_ by his name and think nothing of it, and seamlessly transition into a discussion about chapters six and seven of their assigned reading. His phone vibrated in his pocket and he immediately reached for it. Horror and relief had never been as closely intertwined than when _Stan’s Mom_ lit up on the screen, and he opened the text with fingers trembling.

_  
_

_9:34: Stanley still in ICU. I wanted to let you know the Naloxone is working but Im waiting for him to wake up_

_9:37: He was conscious for a bit during the night and is going to be OK_

_9:38: Can I come and see him?_

_9:42: Yes you can. I might not be here when you are out of school but Randy will be._

_9:45: I need to grab some things for him. Stanley will be here tonight and tomorrow they are transferring him for a psych hold_

_  
_

_9:51: I think he will be happy to see you. He kept asking about you when he was awake_

_  
_

 

For the remainder of class, Kyle couldn’t help but fidget in his seat, desperate to be let loose. What Sharon had told him, _He kept asking about you when he was awake_ , looped in his brain again and again as if to taunt him, to punish him for not being there at his bedside and stroking his hand. The moment the bell began to clatter, he was the first out of his seat and he rushed straight toward the set of double doors down the hall, not stopping until he was cutting through the trees and jogging home. His mother sputtered in confusion, but softened when he tried to croak out an explanation before he was collapsed into her arms, falling just short of blubbering like a child. She caressed his head with her warm, fleshy hands before telling him to go upstairs and take a nap, assuring him that she would take him to see Stan later in the afternoon.

They made a quick stop at the Marsh house; in her haste, Sharon had forgotten to bring Stan a book he requested, which he seemed insistent on having, and if he wouldn’t mind bringing it when he came by. With frost in his eyes, he slipped out of the cold and into the empty house, the full weight of Stan’s absence sitting achingly still in his throat. Any normal day he might find him relaxed on the couch flipping through the channels on TV, or with a controller in hand, or begrudgingly helping his mother with something around the house, but the only noise was of Sparky snoring peacefully on the kitchen floor. Reluctantly, Kyle trudged up the stairs, failing to assuage his paranoia as he relived those brief seconds where he had done exactly this the day before because it was the only reality he had been living in since, that of Stan on the floor with an empty bottle of whiskey, high on Oxycodone he bought from a friend of Kenny’s older brother, and a deep, messy gash running up his arm from a kitchen knife. Stan had briefly indulged in cutting himself in middle school; most were shallow and small, and he promised to stop after Kyle caught and berated him about what a stupid thing it was to do. That was the end of it—he regretted so deeply not being more concerned.

There wasn’t enough air in Stan’s entire house to quell Kyle’s panic, and he shakily lowered himself to a stair step for fear of falling, being sick, or possibly both. It wasn’t just a cry for attention, it wasn’t just a half-assed attempt to get the message across, Stan had truly, genuinely tried to kill himself and the thought was too much to bear. Stan, the same boy who would bring Kyle soup and cough drops when he was sick and sit at his bed, who drunkenly admitted to kissing his John Elway poster once and _only_ once, the same one who cried in the middle of class when they had to watch _The Cove_ had tried to end his life. When Stan left school, he seemed as normal as any other day. Kyle had gone over around six in the evening, Sharon out and busy with errands, but it wasn’t to check up on him. It was just to return a textbook he had left at his house. If he hadn’t wanted Stan to do his chemistry homework, he could’ve been dead. He would be dead and that would be it _._ Kyle took a deep breath and rose back up the stairs, dizzy and upset.

He stared at the slightly open door. It was a new feeling, that of being afraid to step into Stan’s bedroom. It never had once occurred to him that there would ever be a reason to be. Approaching it with a slow pace, eyes shut tight, he pushed through the door. It took him a minute before he was willing to open his eyes, knowing logically there would be nothing and no one there, but still living in the previous day with Stan limp on the floor, cold skin, nothing at all.

Off his night-table he grabbed Stan’s wallet, slipping his ID from the pocket and feeling the picture staring back at him. Kyle lowered himself to the edge of the bed. He gazed at Stan’s driver’s license, grazing his thumb over the photo. Stan received his the first try; it took Kyle four times, alongside months of Stan teaching and re-teaching him in the school parking lot. No matter how panicked or flustered Kyle would get, he never yelled or became impatient. He would say, _“Kyle, you’re the smartest person I know, but you can’t remember ‘down’ for the left signal and ‘up’ for the right?”_ with a playful sneer, and calmly repeat himself. He kept re-reading the information on the license: male, blue eyes, six-foot two, one-hundred and eighty pounds, organ donor.

It came quiet at first, with a modest sniffle and a warm burn in his cheeks, but once the first tear rolled from the tip of his nose onto his knee, the rest followed with the force of a dam flooding into the open. He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes, desperate to derail the sobbing he had worked so hard to keep inside all day to no avail; it never made him feel any better to cry about something. But this was different. His face ached as it contorted with every involuntary, bleating moan and whimper, desperate to take in any air at all as the muscles in his torso spasmed like he had the wind knocked out of him by a baseball bat. The sheets of Stan’s bed were a welcome refuge as he wilted into the mattress, waiting anxiously for his tears to come to pass, sniveling deeply into the sleeve of his jacket. A buzz in his pocket hastened the process.

 

_6:32: Stan is sleeping again and I cant remember the name of the book he wanted. He said it was about rabbits and u would probably know it_

_  
_

Taking a moment to catch his breath and process the request, he batted away his tears, dabbing his eyes on the sleeve of one of Stan’s dirty shirts. He rose from the mattress and began to search his room—in the dresser, on top of the nightstand, on the desk, in the closet—until he dumbly came across one, _Watership Down_ , sticking out just beneath the bed. He observed it in his hands, lightly scraping the frayed edges of its cover, a brown rabbit with beady black eyes gawking at him. Delicately pinching its thick spine, he flipped through it with his thumb and saw every five or so pages were plastered with sticky notes summarizing what had happened, making note of any new characters who were introduced or changes in the setting. The attention paid to the book, by Stan no less, was impeccable—it wasn’t that he was stupid, not at all, or even that he disliked reading, but it took something special to catch and hold his attention. It allowed Kyle to smile while he imagined Stan sitting up late at night in his bed engrossed by a classic novel about the tragic life and death of rabbits. The sticky notes had stopped a little more than halfway through. He continued to flick back and forth between the latest pages, examining his notes when a singular streak of yellow highlighter in the middle of a dense paragraph caught his eye.

_“You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.”_

Kyle brooded over the quote for only a few seconds before shutting the book and tucking it away into his jacket. He walked out of the Marsh residence with it resting against his heart, feeling as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

**

“Those three weeks were really weird,” Stan says. It brings Kyle back out of the memory, and he nods to acknowledge his return to the present. “I was really upset that you couldn’t visit me for the first few days.”

“I would have come every day if they’d let me,” Kyle assures.

“Wendy was really upset when I called and told her where I was,” he says with the hint of a smirk. “She was pissed that you didn’t tell her, like, immediately.”

Kyle recalls Wendy’s reaction quite well; before Stan had been transferred to the psychiatric ward, he made a rushed call to Wendy, that he admittedly was not supposed to be allowed to do, to let her know where he was, and would be, for some time. As Kyle arrived at his locker in the morning, he watched Wendy storm in his direction, her black hair bouncing madly off her shoulders as she erupted into a barrage of balled fists that landed on his chest and arms. He had no time to think of what he possibly could have done to deserve her sudden, and rather painful, wrath before she broke into furious tears, “Why didn’t you tell me! Why didn’t you tell _me_!” With her burst of energy exhausted, the fists fell to her side. Her tears became less angry and more heartbroken, hiding her face and pressing it into Kyle’s shoulder before he rushed her away from the crowd to explain himself, nervous and embarrassed by the attention of their classmates. By the next day, most everyone else knew.

“I wonder how everyone found out,” Stan ponders. It's been a mystery for him, and an unwelcome one at that. It was degrading enough to be treated as if he were made of glass by his teachers, but the serious whispers and occasional snicker behind his back only served to agitate him.

“I think it was one of the girls,” Kyle says.

“Which one?”

“Not sure. Bebe asked me about it in private because Wendy told her, but I think she understood it was something to keep to herself. I think it was Nelly.”

“Figures,” he spits. “All she goddamn does is gossip.”

“Does it bother you that people know?”

“It did for a while, but not anymore. I just wish Cartman would stop referring to me as ‘Girl, Interrupted’ to everyone.” 

“I’m gonna kick his ass the next time he does,” Kyle says defiantly. Stan laughs.

Their fingers are still tangled in a loose embrace when Stan withdraws his hand and rolls onto his back. He takes in a deep breath that produces a dull ache in his lungs, and lets it escape through puckered lips. His body still feels out of sync with his mind, but he knows he’s beginning to come down. He doesn’t have to turn his head much to meet Kyle’s eye as he lies on his side. “Wendy thought I was going to be angry that I was being kept and I didn’t know how long for,” he muses. “But I wasn’t. I mean, I was at first—well, not really like, angry, but I was really upset. But I don’t know, I wasn’t angry. I can’t really describe what I was.”

**

Stan didn’t know what to expect when he was being transferred. Overhearing the doctors refer to his parents as him being ‘mentally ill’ as well as ‘a danger to himself’ was strange—it never occurred to him to consider himself mentally ill. He always imagined the label being reserved for the girls who threw up in the bathroom after lunch or those who hallucinated dead people. All he knew of psych wards was what he’d seen in _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ , and he despaired at the prospect of being lobotomized by a deranged nurse and smothered with a pillow.

He shared a room with a boy a year younger than him named Thomas. He was a polite and quiet kid; he suffered from OCD and tapped out the syllables of every word he spoke, making sure every sentence ended in an even number. They didn’t speak all too much, but was a comforting presence when Stan was informed by a nurse that for the first three days, he wouldn’t be allowed any visitors or phone calls, not even from his family. Despite his protests and begging, the attendants were coolly insistent on his isolation, with little more than a slight curve of their eyebrow for sympathy. He cried all of his first night. His eyes and throat were sore from continuous weeping, and he was only able to stop for the briefest moment when he heard Thomas shuffle from his bed, count out the eight steps over to his, and hand him two tissues without saying a word.

Under the impression that after three days he would be allowed to leave, he resolved to spend each day sleeping as much as he possibly could, bargaining that his time would pass much quicker so long as he wasn’t conscious to wait for it. It wasn’t difficult, either. The sight of heavily-sedated psychotics with vacant eyes shuffling the ward wasn’t exactly a stimulant, and the dreary, neutral tones of both the walls and the beds provided an excellent drain for any of his remaining energy. He refused to shower, eat his meals or even brush his teeth, not bothering to take even one trip to the nurses’ station to request any of his belongings. On the third day, the staff psychiatrist formally requested to speak with him, forcing him to unearth from his burrow of sheets.

The air was snatched from his lungs when he was made aware that, since he was still a minor, he would be held indefinitely until they determined him fit to be released. He began to stammer in disbelief, panicking that he had to go home, he needed to leave because he had school—immediately refuted by the fact the school had already been notified of the reason for his absence. “But what about my parents?” he cried, only to be delicately informed that his parents didn’t want him returning yet, either. His memory of what happened afterward is slightly vague: tears unlike any he had before began to bubble on his waterline as he frowned with trembling, pursed lips. He couldn’t breathe; no matter how forcefully he sucked in air it wouldn’t satiate him, his heart pulsing in his chest with the ferocity of a bulldozer crashing through a wall. He felt dizzy, but could neither stand nor speak. He tried to pull away as the psychiatrist gently took his hands and expressed that she wanted to help him, mollifying him with the promise that if he participated in group activities and his treatment, he would leave relatively soon. She calmly listed off the ways in which he could do just that, but her words jumbled in his ears, like she wasn’t even speaking English—just words that sounded like it. He could only stare at the cracking, chestnut-colored skin of her hands cupping his. If he could have felt anything in his legs other than a stiff numbness, he would have run. “Stanley,” she said, looking him firmly in the eye. “I believe you’re having an anxiety attack. Concentrate on your breathing.” The idea of something, _anything_ else being wrong with him only made his muscles tense, and his crying more vigorous. She very cautiously leaned closer to him, speaking in a kind, low half-whisper. “I know you’re feeling frightened, but you’re not in danger. You’re safe here.” She repeated this comforting mantra as he withered in his chair, and after several minutes of encouragement to breathe in small intervals, his anxiety began to subside, if only by a little. “Good job,” she would say clearly, “I’m very proud of you.” She allowed him to come down in silence, telling him that she thought maybe he had enough for one day, and that they would continue this at a later date, hoping the reminder that tomorrow was Tuesday, as well as the end of his seventy-two-hour hold, and that he would be allowed visitation would help relax him.

Stan anxiously waited at an empty table out on the main floor, bobbing his knee up and down. After his breakdown, he settled on changing his behavior with a shower. The heat was only lukewarm, and he could feel his skin beginning to dry out in the calcium-rich hardwater, but after days and days of oil sitting in the pores of his skin and bogging down each individual strand of hair, it gave him immediate relief to scrub his skin raw and strip it away. It had been his first real day of any kind of participation in his treatment; he found out that most people spent their first days asleep as well, whether it be a side-effect of their drug cocktails or just plain depression like him. He wasn’t used to the rigidity of his new schedule: wake up at eight, be shuffled off by a nurse to take both a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant, eat breakfast at nine, in and out of different therapy sessions until one in the afternoon, where he would eat the same thing he had for breakfast except with slightly less fervor, and afterward he would enjoy a few hours of his own free time until he met with his psychiatrist. It had been a long and tasking day, both emotionally and physically as she explained to him that she highly suspected he was suffering from type-two bipolar disorder, and though they were cautious to diagnose and medicate minors for such an illness, he could only feel his stomach twist as she summarized what she had learned of him in relation to the symptoms, self-aware enough to recognize himself in all the criteria. There were equal parts relief and devastation in knowing what was wrong with him and its name.

He sat in fresh clothes waiting for his parents to arrive. And Kyle. He hadn’t seen Kyle since he blacked out in the ambulance, somberly fixating on the fuzzy sight and sound of him weeping his name and age and blood type and that he was allergic to penicillin to the EMT. His mother had told him that he came to see him the day before he was placed in psych, but that Stan was asleep again by the time he got there, and Kyle was adamant about not waking him up if it was unnecessary. He watched the entrance impatiently.

His mother arrived first, and as he observed her sign in and chat briskly with a nurse, he realized he had never been happier to see her in his entire life. Directed with a pointed finger towards the table, he watched her melt as she jogged to him, pulling him into a crippling hug and pecking the top of his head with kisses. She took his face in her hands and continued to shower him with love; in any other scenario, he would be deeply embarrassed by her, but here, he never wanted it to stop. “Where’s dad?” he asked, leaning to look at the double doors. His mother sadly informed him that he had to drive back to Boulder, but would be formally requesting a few weeks off from work to stay with them, and would visit on Thursday. “Is Kyle coming?” he asked with much more concern, to which she quickly assured that yes, she spoke to Kyle and he was on his way, and would be there shortly before crooning, “I’m so happy to see you, Stanley.”

As Kyle meekly stepped through the doors, with a look on his face as if he was unsure if he was where he was supposed to be, they each glanced over the other before locking eyes. His gaze was hesitant, not completely convinced that he wasn’t only seeing things. Stan stood from his chair, as if to declare, _Yeah, it’s me_. Kyle let the door swing behind him, taking slow measured steps before breaking into an all-out sprint and wrapping around him like a boa coiling a mouse, rocking him with the force of his impact. He refused to let go even as a nurse called to him several times, requesting him to sign in first and surrender his things. Stan only chose to remember the warmth of their cheeks pressed together.

With all three of them seated, Stan quickly realized he had no idea what he should say. He wasn’t in the mood to recount his past three days, considering those entire seventy-two hours were spent ping-ponging between sleeping and staring blankly at the wall. “I called before I came to ask if I could bring you something,” Kyle said, reaching inside his jacket. He pulled out an unopened bag of candy orange slices and slid them across the table in front of Stan. “These are the ones you like, right?” He did like him. They were his favorite, actually. Stan picked them up, turning the bag over in his hands. He enjoyed the sound of the sugar granules scraping against each other. “Yeah,” he muttered, awestruck with how to convey his sincere gratitude. “Thank you.”

His mother asked if he was adjusting at all, to which he responded that yes, he was, though the slight downturn of her mouth suggested that she knew this to be a blatant lie. He hoped that she hadn’t already known about his having a panic attack—the idea that all of his conduct was being silently reported to her by the watchful eyes that surrounded him induced a sense of claustrophobia. His mother began to pry, saying she understood what he was feeling, but had no idea it was _this_ serious, as if there were some lesser, more palatable form of depression. “How long have you felt this way, Stanley?” she asked. Stan could only shrug his shoulders. He couldn’t exactly give her the concise time period he knew she was looking for, so he made one up, though it wasn’t exactly untrue. “I don’t know…a year or two, maybe.”

Her mouth sat open as her eyes glazed over. “Two years?” she said softly, incredulous that she could have overlooked such a thing. “But…sweetie, why…why wouldn’t you tell me?”

He shrugged his shoulders again. It never occurred to him, really, that something was wrong with him, that life wasn’t just this difficult for everyone else, too, that not everyone felt okay until suddenly they didn’t, that he wasn’t just making it up and being dramatic or overreacting and had a piss-poor way of dealing with it. “You can tell me anything, Stanley,” she lulled while placing her hands on his.

“Yeah, I know, mom,” he groaned, pulling away. He knew this only hurt her more—she was just trying to be close—but he couldn’t help it. Guilt began to settle in and made itself cozy and at home in his chest. He immediately rectified his mistake and took her hand again, holding her fingers loosely in his palm. _When did they become so cold? When did they become so thin?_ Her skin was little more than a blanket for the bluish veins and tendons, each knuckle sharp mountains on the landscape of her hands. He worried he was prematurely aging his mother into a skeleton. “You know how much I love you, Stanley,” she sobbed, and he couldn’t tell whether it was a statement or a question. His eyes began to burn as he whispered that he loved her, too.

She sniffed a couple times before her eyes diverted upwards, and without needing to arch his neck, he could feel the omniscient presence of his psychiatrist standing behind them. His mother quickly rose from her chair and extended her hand, introducing herself with ‘we-spoke-on-the-phone’ politeness. “You seem much better today, Stan,” she said, patting him twice on the shoulder. “I hate to intrude on your time, but I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak with your mother privately. Would that be all right?” He was secretly glad that someone was whisking her away, because he didn’t know how much more of her gentle declarations of love he could take before he would cry, too. He agreed.

“Well, I’ll leave you boys alone for a while,” his mother said, pushing in her chair. She sauntered over to Stan and placed another kiss on the top of his head, before mumbling that it would only take a second and she would be back soon. The clacking heels of both women became distant until they all but disappeared around the hallway. With only the two of them on opposite sides of the table, Stan felt as if he could relax. With a large exhale, he laid his body on the table and stretched out his arms, moaning Kyle’s name as he followed suit, and they twined their fingers together. Kyle sighed, “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“Well,” Stan said, rolling his head as if to remind them of where he was. “I’m not, really.”

“I-I know, I just meant, like, that I’m-I’m just—”

“I know what you meant,” he smiled coyly. “I was just fucking with you.”

Kyle laughed nervously. Stan’s self-deprivation was slightly less entertaining when it hinged on his entrapment in a psychiatric hospital. “I packed your book, by the way,” he said. “The one about the rabbits.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, your mom said you asked for it.”

“I don’t even remember that.”

“You don’t?”

“They had me on so much shit, dude, I really don’t remember much,” Stan admitted. He could feel Kyle’s discomfort at the thought that this deed might have gone unnoticed, or rather, the thought that it was insignificant. Kyle slipped his fingers away from Stan’s, opting instead to take his right hand and examine the stitches that ran from his wrist up to his forearm, tracing his fingers carefully around the bruising and blood that lingered in the spaces between mangled flesh. “It’s gonna scar, isn’t it?” Stan asked. Kyle looked at him with a discontented glare. Obviously, it was going to scar, and that was clear to anyone. Stan didn’t know why he said it. “Have you been keeping them covered?” Kyle asked.

“Keeping it—what?”

“The skin on your wrist is really soft and puffy, have you been keeping your stitches covered?”

“Well, I didn’t take the bandages off until—”

“Because you really should only cover them at night, y’know, to keep them from snagging on the bed or whatever, if you keep it wrapped all day it’s going to moisten your skin and make them weep and could lead to an infection if—”

“Kyle,” Stan commanded, squeezing his wrist. Kyle stiffened a bit in his seat and softly nodded his head, looking toward the middle of the table and tucking his hands into his lap. Stan was overcome with the urge to shake him. Never in his life had he had this urge before, and now it was the only thing he could think of doing. He wanted Kyle of all people to act normally around him, as he would any other day, and the fact that he wasn’t was beginning to worry him that no one ever would again.

“Stan,” Kyle hushed, looking over his shoulder. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. He expected Kyle to ask the same thing his mother had, only worded with more eloquence than an uncomfortable _Why would you do this?_ He watched him fidget in his seat—he never seemed able to get comfortable in his chair—before propping his elbows on the table and leaning in. “Am I—am I a bad friend to you?”

“Wh…What?”

“It’s just…” He bit his lip as his eyes darted back and forth in his head like a pinball machine. “It’s just—how did I miss this?”

“Kyle, you’re my _best_ friend—”

“Then how could I not have known? I mean I knew you were…y’know—I didn’t know you were like _this_ … I just wish I could have done something for you, instead of letting it get…here.”

Stan looked on as Kyle casted his head downward, fixated on Stan’s arm as if the wound itself was physically tormenting him, like speaking to it directly would give him the answers he so desperately yearned for. “I want to understand, Stan. I want to help you. I don’t care how, I just do.”

He didn’t have an answer to give. He hardly understood why he felt the way he did, and was much less able to make someone else understand it for him, even someone as perceptive and empathetic like Kyle.

“Do you…want to talk about it?” Kyle asked.

“Not really,” Stan said stoically. “At least, not right now…is that okay?”

“Of course, dude. What do you wanna talk about?”

“I don’t know. Literally anything else.”

Kyle alternated between explaining to Stan the thesis of his art history research paper about Artemisia Gentileschi and the posthumous influence of her work and life on women in the arts, the differences between Keynesian and neoclassical economic theory (taking the time to thoroughly explain both concepts to him in the simplest terms possible), and about his recent foray into reading constellations in the sky and how he couldn’t wait until he was back home and they could lay out a blanket and look at them together because he found out he had a great view of _Canis Major_ from his backyard. Kyle’s complete and utter comprehensible knowledge on any and everything imaginable was an overwhelming and fantastic distraction, and it left Stan wishing he had smarter questions to ask.

When both he and his mom, along with all the other sad and disoriented families, left strictly at seven, the first thing Stan did was retrieve the book from his belongings and sweet-talk a nurse into letting him keep it in his room, almost flubbing the entire operation by making an off-hand promise not to use it to give himself a paper cut on his throat. He stayed up all night, even past lights-out, to finish it, nestling it safe into his arms around three in the morning as he drifted to sleep with the knowledge that Kyle had held it and packed it special for him.

**

“I always wanted to ask you what it was like, but didn’t know if I should,” Kyle says timidly.

There’s so much about his time that he wishes he could share with Kyle. He wants to tell him how group therapy was mostly useless, except when it was art or music-based, how each of the nurses seemed to be more detached than the next. He wants to tell Kyle about how unnatural the sunlight felt when he was home, and how he has no way to explain to his mother the infinite strangeness that now plagued the sensation of stepping outside and feeling it bathe his skin. He’s always wanted to tell Kyle about one of the other patients he met there--he’s dismayed that he can’t remember her name, either. She was their age, or maybe a year older, her hair was long and mangy, her face sharp and hardy in a way that reminded him of his sister, but she was incredibly kind.

A few days before Stan had left, she had a psychotic episode shortly after breakfast. She laughed and cried at the same time, nervous because she was hearing voices; she wasn’t hurting anyone, just scared. One of the male nurses came over to remove her, and grabbed at her arm with such force that Stan worried he might snap her in half like a branch. It frightened her immensely, and she began to cry and kick, screaming unintelligibly to be let go. Two more attendants rushed over, restraining her with such unflappable cruelty it made him ill. He never quite got over one of the other men telling her to shut up as he yanked her from the seat, and he felt convicted to do something, but cowered when he realized there was no one to whom he could go—the only person he could think to tell was a nurse, and they were the ones doing it. She couldn’t have been more than eighty, ninety pounds and they hulked her away to the horrific “quiet room” he had heard so much about down the hall. Before, being there had felt somewhat like an incredibly boring, mundane, personally invasive camp of sorts, but every day after that felt like prison. He never did get to see her before he left.

Stan wants nothing more than to tell Kyle all this, but it feels like the kind of thing he should hold onto, an experience he lives with having told no one about before, letting it shape his life indefinitely in a quiet, somber way.

“…I spent so much time coloring,” he says, settling on something benign.

“Coloring? Like, with crayons?”

“Yeah. Yeah, with crayons. I liked that…can I ask you something?”

“What?” Kyle asks softly.

“What would you have done if I actually, like, died?”

His face is serious, expecting a genuine answer that Kyle simply can’t provide. Even though he’s looking Stan in the face, he can physically see the whites of his eyes and the fullness of his cheeks and the way his fingers never seem to stop searching for something, it doesn’t appease the terror dwelling at the thought of standing at his funeral. “Don’t make me think about it,” is all Kyle can say. “I…I really don’t know.”

Stan buries his jaw into his shoulder and brazenly rolls his eyes, displeased with his answer. “Well, I promise not to try and kill myself again,” he says. “Or at least not until after you move away to Harvard or New York or some shit.”

“Stan, don’t,” Kyle scolds, shutting his eyes.

“Oh, relax,” he laughs, “I’m just kidding.”

“I know, but I don’t think it’s funny, Stan.”

He watches Kyle conceal his face in his forearm. A twinge of guilt radiates in a corner of his heart; without meaning to, he always manages to find the exact right words to upset him, the opposite effect Kyle has always had on him. It was unfair of him to ask that. He shouldn’t have joked about it either, understanding how sensitive Kyle is to it, but he never seems to able to help himself. Half the time when he opens his mouth to speak, he knows no better than anyone else what he’s about to say. “Kyle…” Stan moans. His voice is hoarse and delicate, soaked in sleepiness. He stirs beneath the blanket with a mellow grin, and takes Kyle’s arm, petting it gently with the fleshy pads of his fingertips.

Kyle reluctantly looks back at him. Stan’s glassy, docile doe eyes are peering right though him, and though not as bad as when he first picked him up, they still wander in his head as if they can’t decide on which area of Kyle’s face they want to focus on.

“…Can I kiss you?” Stan asks, with a prolonged blink.

They had done it once before a few summers ago, when they were fourteen. The television had been on all night, and they were only half-paying attention to its droning buzz when they caught a glance at a subtly overt commercial for a show about two gay men. It had piqued both of their curiosities, each of them staring in silence at the screen even after its thirty-second bump was over. The two were thinking the same thing; he remembers Stan being the first to say, “I wonder what it’s like to kiss a guy.” With the knowing look that those two shared only with each other, Kyle scrambled from the bed to the floor next to Stan, and after a thorough reassurance that this was purely for informative purposes and did not indict either of them in being gay, and even if one of them _was_ , that was totally cool too, no big deal and no judgement, they pressed together and kissed. He remembered Stan’s lips were slightly chapped; he could taste the metallic iron of dried blood. After about five seconds, they pulled apart and stared at each other. “It doesn’t feel all the different to me,” Kyle said. Stan nodded his head in agreement. “Me either.”

He could feel his face flushing, and he wonders at first if he heard him right. Simply for a lack of words, he hasn’t said anything yet, and Stan seems undeterred by his stillness. There was something about the unassuming way with which he asked that made Kyle sad. “I don’t think we should, Stan,” he whispers. “You—y’know, you’re drunk, I wouldn’t feel right about it.” Stan stiffens under the blanket and sighs with visible disappointment. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he confides. “I was gonna ask in the car, but uh…I wanted to see what it felt like again.”

“It felt the same.” There’s a bashful, flighty feeling welling just above Kyle’s stomach. It tickles him in an incredibly soothing and irritating way. “Remember?”

“Just one,” Stan pleads, “Real quick. Please.”

“ _Okay_ , okay,” Kyle sighs, caving in to Stan’s insistent desire to revisit the experience. “Go ahead.”

Stan smiles as he stretches toward him, laying his cold, calloused fingers on the curve of his neck. The springs of the bed chirr as he sits slightly up, tilting his head and losing his thoughts in the features of Kyle’s face. A sliver of moon escapes the curtain of his window and cuts across his mossy eyes, soaking every bit of light in their greenery. He inches his hand upward to his jaw and brushes his thumb against the petite moles and freckles that sit shelved on his cheek. Stan loves how self-conscious he is of them, and resists the urge to laugh while Kyle smolders beneath him. With a happy, inaudible hum, he lowers his head and pecks their lips together.

He wonders why it feels so different this time. Before, it felt the same as when he kissed anyone else, whether it be his girlfriend in the park or his mother before bed. Kissing Wendy now was exciting, it riled him up and thrashed inside of him like a ship on choppy water. But this is calm; he imagined himself napping outside in the sun. The beating of his heart is almost hard enough to be alarming, and his breath slips away from him as he further parts his lips. He relishes in the clean scent of Kyle’s skin, feeling his long eyelashes flicker against his cheek.

As Stan pulls away, they stare at each other again, as they had before. There’s no television to serve as a buffer, nothing for the two of them to place the blame for their curiosity and their willingness to indulge in this reverie. Neither of them knows what to say, or whether anything should be said at all. But after little deliberation, when Stan leans in again, Kyle makes no attempt to stop him.

Stan’s lips are softer this time, full and inviting as they pry his apart. Kyle never has had much experience, or confidence, in this activity; he briefly dated a few girls here and there. Nice girls who he had stayed friendly with, the kind of girls who wouldn’t tell him whether they thought he was a bad kisser or not. He’s eager to follow a more experienced lead. Stan traces the tip of his tongue around Kyle’s upper lip, teasing him with just enough to leave starved for more. The sensation of his tongue in his mouth, much less colliding and circling his own, is strange and wonderful and overwhelming. He can taste the muted traces of whiskey, cigarettes and vomit, but instead of wincing in disgust it only makes him hungrier. Their teeth clack together as Stan moans into his mouth. His hand is still cupping the edge of Kyle’s jaw, trembling as his fingernails drag across the skin beneath his chin, causing him to shudder with pleasure. It feels silly for him to just lay there, doing nothing, and he slinks a hand up Stan’s chest, resting it there and absorbing the thumping of his heart and praying he doesn’t mistake this for a gesture to stop. He does not. Though he had spent the better part of the last hour sulking and sobbing, a virile, commanding air emanates from him now. Kyle finds himself envious of Wendy, if it means this is what they do when they’re alone, Stan sucking gently on his bottom lip and nibbling with a small whimper, refusing to pause even for a second. He knows he should stop Stan. From every corner of his brain, he’s bombarded with questioning the ethics and implications of his passivity. But their lips smacking, hard and soft, fast and slow, lull him into the rhythm of reciprocating.

There’s a fierce, near primal flash in Stan’s eye as he leans off Kyle, chasing after his stolen breath. With a couple of drawn-out huffs, he buckles back down onto the bed and lays his head firmly into the side of Kyle’s shoulder, tucking one arm into his chest and maneuvering the other beneath the pillows. He swallows the fascinating taste that lingers in his mouth. It seems impossible that only minutes before he had asked very humbly for something he knew he would get.

Kyle’s head feels as if it’s spinning; he waits for the moment when he’ll wake up in his own bed, alone, to be at once relieved and dismayed at the prospect that this was all just some kind of sick fever dream of his. That same uncomfortable tickle sits in his stomach. The dead air of Stan’s room is suffocating as he holds back the neurotic impulse to babble aloud through his thoughts, hoping he finds some logical explanation for what happened along the way. With a slight tip of his head, he looks at Stan out of the corner of his eye. The meek way he blinks, his gaze not fixated on anything as he prepares to slip into sleep, his warm breath on his arm, the familiar essence of his hair, earthy and sweet and only a little oily. He’s struck with incoherence; he can’t think of an explanation, and he’s not sure he wants to. He shuts his eyes and gives in.

**

Every time he dreams of Stan it’s the same: he’s darting into his house, the living room flooded with the stiff empty bodies of their families, their friends, their neighbors casting judgmental, calculated glares in his direction, sternly blocking his path. The echo of Stan’s screaming upstairs flows down the banister and impales itself in his ears, a piercing ache bouncing around his head as he struggles to wrestle off the strange hands grasping at his clothes and weighing him down. When he reaches the stairs, he bounds upward two, even three steps at a time as quickly as he can, yet he never seems to go anywhere, trapped squarely between the stories as he listens to Stan wail for him. When he eventually does make it to the top, he crawls on all fours toward his bedroom, unable to dislodge the yell stuck in his throat or take in any air. His hand trembles on the doorknob as he pulls himself up from the floor and presses his ear to wall, listening to the sound of Stan moaning and bawling his name. He cries out to him, yanking open the door only to reveal another one behind it. No matter how many he would open he never got through, and the dull dread in his stomach transmuting to hysteria as he taunts him on the other side, _You better hurry, Kyle! Not long now!_ In between the delirium of his tears and his panting, he would arrive at a door with no handle and viciously tear it apart with his bare hands, splintering the jagged wood beneath his nails as the blood stains the frame and trickles down his arms. As he crosses the threshold of Stan’s room, his back is always turned to him, shaking as if he were softly crying. Kyle would carefully toe toward him, whispering his name. The moment his hand connected with his shoulder to face him, to say, _It’s me, I’m here, you’re okay_ , Stan’s body would go limp, fall backward onto him, dead with eyes wide open like a startled deer, glazed over and cold.

Kyle manages to startle awake without screaming this time. With a shaky hand, he pats his chest to calm the rapid palpitations of his heart, the cool air grazing over the burgeoning sweat on his forehead. He whips his head and sees Stan still nuzzled into his arm, and resists the overwhelming urge to jostle him awake, to make sure that he was alive as he holds the imaginary bloody stumps of his fingers to his face as proof, telling him that he tried, he goddamn tried. In the pit of his stomach something foul begins to turn, and his throat begins to tighten as if he might vomit. With as much urgency he can muster, he creeps his weight off the bed, planting his feet onto the carpet and crouching toward the wastebasket next to the night-table. Stan rouses for a moment, but seamlessly readjusts to his absence.

He gasps repeatedly for a fulfilling breath, any at all, feeling the color drain from his face as he clings to the metal rim. It was bound to happen tonight. For just under a year now, Kyle would have this dream at least once a week. In the immediate days that followed Stan’s hospitalization, it happened every night, unrelenting in its terrifying amalgamation of all of Kyle’s inadequacies and shortcomings, his inability to save the person he was closest to on this earth. It took several months before he could achieve any restful sort of sleep. He’d become much better at handling it recently, but there was something about the cadence of its occurrence in this room, in that bed, Stan on his arm and fresh on his tongue that made it particularly sinister. Despite a few dry, tinny coughs and the lingering feeling in his gut, nothing manages to come up, and though he’s relieved, he wishes he could vomit just to get it to go away.

 Kyle perches his head over his shoulder to glimpse again at the peaceful image of Stan curled up in the blanket, and softly sighs. He was perfectly content to lie alongside him, even if it meant spending hours doing nothing but staring at the ceiling. But he’s already gotten up, and has no intention of disturbing Stan from the deep sleep he was surely having and undoubtedly earned. “Water,” he whispers under his breath. “I need some water.”

As he pulls shut the door behind him, he takes a second to steady himself against the hallway wall and swallow hard the lump in his throat. He craves the comfort of a cigarette, to calm himself with the promise of nicotine waiting in his car, but decides against it. He takes each step with more discretion than was probably necessary, touching back down in the living room and skulking in the dark toward the kitchen, relying on his memorized map of Stan’s house to avoid stubbing a toe or banging a hip. As he ambles into the entryway he locks eyes with Stan’s mother while she doddles with something on the counter, stuck somewhere between shock and fear that he’d been caught doing something wrong. “Oh, uh, hi, Ms. Marsh,” he stutters.

“Hello, Kyle. Would you like some tea?”

He scratches at his arm and nods. There’s an aloofness to her tone that strikes him, as if she’s not at all surprised by his sudden presence in her home. Not as if it was all that strange for him to be there to begin with. On more than one occasion she had introduced Kyle to other adults as “her second son” with a hearty laugh, and even after the divorce, he had always hung around like their familial phantom limb. Kyle clears his throat before accepting. “Some tea actually sounds really good.”

She motions in the general direction of the table while placing two ceramic cups onto the counter. The kettle on the stove bubbles with its lid open, and she places an aromatic teabag in each one. He eyes the box from the table, unable to gather any information about it other than it being a white tea with an exotic-sounding name he couldn’t decide on how to pronounce. “Here you go, sweetie,” she trills. She places it in front of him before walking to the other side of the table.

Kyle promptly thanks her, blowing away some steam before taking a gulp, basking in the way it mildly scalds his mouth. Sharon pauses as she reaches to the opposite end, taking a moment to gaze out the window and admire the bleak weather. She lowers herself into the creaky chair. Of all the adults, Ms. Marsh always seemed to be one of the most level-headed, as she often was not prone to panic or hysteria in the event of strange happenings in town. Even when she was in distress, she very rarely wore it on her face. It was the most noticeable quality Stan inherited from his mother, much to his detriment. Kyle spots the small clock on the microwave, the bright green readout flashing ‘5: 38.’

“Do you usually get up this early?” he asks.

“I like the quiet of the morning,” She says, bobbing her teabag gently in the water. “I like having some calm time to myself.”

“I’m sorry to intrude.”

“Oh, no, Kyle, you’re fine,” she beams. “I always like having you around.”

 The two of them sit in silence for a few minutes, quietly enjoying the other’s company. It felt very adult to him, to be sitting politely with a friend’s mother in this manner—a reticent cup of tea with her was a welcomed change. They exchange a few delicate smiles before addressing the obvious. “Is Stan asleep upstairs?” she asks.

“Yeah, he’s asleep.”

A concerned look hides behind her eyes. He notices her bouncing her leg. “Was he drinking?” she asks, her voice slightly lower than before. Kyle finds himself torn between his devotion to Stan and the truth—he wasn’t sure to what extent his mother knew about him and his habits—and finds a sordid compromise between the two. “Well, a little.”

She lets out a forlorn sigh, taking a sip from her cup. “I could hear you two coming in the door earlier. I heard his voice from my bedroom. He sounded…” She halts on the thought with a vacant stare and waves it away, taking another drink. Kyle absently picks at his nail under the table, uncertain of what to say next. He fears that maybe he’s said the wrong thing, that he’s upset her, and he doesn’t know how to rectify it. “He doesn’t like it when I say it,” Kyle leads, “But I worry about him sometimes. Well…uh, kind of a lot, actually.”

Sharon titters, propping her elbow onto the table. “You and me both, kiddo.”

He observes the way her hair wilts just past her shoulders. Since he was a child, he always remembered Sharon with a short, choppy pageboy cut, and she almost looks like a stranger to him with longer hair. He wonders if it’s a conscious choice on her part, or if it’s simply a matter of being indifferent. She stretches out her back and folds her hands on the table. “I’m happy he at least has you, still,” she says. “Most of the others seemed to just fall to the wayside after a while.”

He couldn’t tell if she was referring generally to their circle of friends or more pointedly at Kenny and Cartman. She digs around in her robe looking for something, patting the various pockets before settling on one. “You were always, _always_ , his best friend. Every night at dinner when he was little, ‘Me and Kyle this, me and Kyle that,’” she croons, tossing her hand left and right. “It was so cute.”

Kyle takes the mug and holds it in his hand, subduing a smile in the corner of his lips. Her memory greets him warmly, largely in part because he remembers beginning many of his own family dinners with the same set of dialogue after being prompted by his mother about what he did that day: _Me and Stan, me and Stan, me and Stan…_

Sharon retrieves a pack of cigarettes, and plucks one from the foil liner. As she sparks her lighter, she offers out the pack in his direction. Kyle arches his eyebrows, and looks at her apprehensively, dubious as to whether this is a trap of some kind. “Do you want—” she mumbles just before she’s taken aback, her mouth hanging open, as if she only just realized who it was sitting across from her, cheeks tinged pink with embarrassment. Kyle smirks. Sharon holds her forehead in her free hand, shaking slowly. “I can’t believe I just offered you a cigarette.”

Kyle chuckles, taking a sip. “I promise not to tell.”

“Your mother would have my head.”

“It’s okay. My dad’s been smoking behind my mom’s back for a while. So have I.”

Sharon snickers—even Kyle, arguably one of the most well-behaved and mild-mannered boys in all of South Park was privy to mischief. She shakes her head again. The lighter sparks, and she puffs three times before inhaling, taking it in her fingers and inspecting as if it were a foreign object. “I gave up coffee because I thought it was bad for me,” she confesses with a sort of light snarl. “But I picked up a different habit that was even worse.”

“I can’t believe you kids are already in your last year of high school,” she murmurs, rubbing at her collarbone to assuage the nostalgia that begins to creep in. “It sounds so mom-ish, I know, but it seems like just yesterday I was reading Stan bedtime stories and hanging his finger paintings on the fridge.” Sharon taps her cigarette against the edge of a decorative porcelain bowl that now functions as an ashtray. Kyle lowers his head, and prudently studies her expression: her eyes glazed in a thin film of water, hiding them away with lethargic blinks. He watches a grin flicker in the corner of her mouth only to disappear soon after. Her fingers fidget as she takes a prolonged drag of her cigarette, holding it in and letting it burn. She tilts her head skyward and lets it go. Kyle knows it best to say nothing.

“He’s still my baby,” she whispers, more to herself than to anyone else. For a minute, she forgets he’s there, absorbing her sobering words with a sympathetic ear. She glances at Kyle, having a difficult time reconciling his presence as an eighteen-year-old adult with the plucky visage of his adolescent self that is permanently etched into her brain, loving that he still has that goofy bird’s nest of bright red hair. She feels it inappropriate to bounce her anguish off him, but does so anyway. He nods with understanding and waits.

“But it’s different now. I can’t help him with a band-aid anymore, or a hug, or an ‘I love you.’ He’ll…he’ll uh, go through these periods where he smiles more, where he opens up to me again, where I-I think whatever needs to happen for him to be happy again—happens! But by the next week…” She juts her head to the ceiling, letting Stan speak for her. “I just…don’t know how to help him.”

He watches her tap a fingernail against the rim of her mug.

“I think he just feels out of control of things, y’know,” he says. “Like he, um, like he feels like he can’t control the things that happen around him in a way that he—that he can deal with so he just lets them happen.” Kyle feels stupid, unable to control his babbling. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure if his assessment of Stan was even correct; he had no idea how he felt. He did, but he didn’t. It was difficult to explain. Though his mood swings were moderately more tolerable with his medication, he still seemed to gravitate toward them and indulge, as if his everchanging disposition was a soothing relic, a safety blanket of some kind that he had no intention of giving up. “And then he just kind of…self-destructs.”

Sharon sits quietly on his words. She mulls them over in her head, a jigsaw into Stan’s mind falling into place and allowing her a previously hidden insight into her son. Kyle was, after all, the ultimate authority on all things Stan Marsh. She sips at her tea before she turns fully to him. “Kyle, will you tell me something? God knows Stan would never tell me.”

“Sure, Ms. Marsh.”

He watches her squirm in her chair, considering if she wants to know the answer before she’s even asked the question. Peering over her shoulders as if Stan was looming over her, intimidating her into silence, she leans over the table and asks in a hush, “Does he blame me?”

“Uh, for…for what?”

“For…anything, I guess.” Sharon taps a few fingers against her mug, staring helplessly into her reflection glaring back at her in the tea. “For the divorce, maybe. Y’know, for the way things are, for his depression.” She looks at him with sad, kind eyes. The misery of her words traps Kyle’s heart in a vice, pulverizing it into an unrecognizable and bloody pulp until it sits, listless and heavy, in the pit of his stomach. He feels it only right to absolve her of this undeserved guilt that she’s nurtured.

“No, he’s never said anything like that. I think he was, uh, kind of relieved, actually. The fighting and all—it really stressed him out.” He decides not to tell her that that the only person that Stan frequently blames is himself.

Sharon emphatically nods her head, sharing in that same relief and glad to know that it was mutual. With one last quick puff, she squashes the cigarette filter into the bowl and waves away the idling smoke. Leaving her almost empty glass on the table, she rises from her chair and re-ties her robe. “Well, I’m feeling a little tired, so I think I’m going to go lie down again,” she says. Her face becomes serious yet calm as if to assure that her gratitude does not go unexpressed. “Thank you, really, for taking care of him. Bringing him home.”

“Just doin’ my job.” Kyle offers her a humorous salute as he guzzles down the last of his tea, appreciating the way it settles his stomach. He would try that too, lying down. She laughs, tussling the curls of his hair as she disappears behind him. “You’re a good kid,” she says softly. “Stay that way, please.”

He eases into the bed as weightlessly as he can, pausing when he hears the springs creak beneath him. Stan had turned in the meantime, his back now facing toward Kyle, though he appeared to still be sleeping soundly. As he lifted the last of himself onto the mattress, he sighed with satisfaction at having snuck back into bed like a master criminal. He lets his head fall to the nape of Stan’s neck and lies comfortably huddled into his back, savoring his feverish warmth. Without warning, Stan tenses beneath him, straining to look over his shoulder and mumbling so incoherently Kyle can only soothe him by whispering, “Sorry, just me, it’s just me.”

“Wh…where’d you go?”

“Nowhere, I—”

“Don’t leave,” Stan murmurs. He lets his head flop back down to the pillow. His voice is small and shaky, like he’s requesting the world of Kyle in that moment and is afraid it’s too much. Kyle take his roving hand beneath the comforter, holding it loosely in his own as he drapes an arm over him. He feels Stan’s sweet, small moans on his fingers, and he pulls them even closer into his chest. “Don’t leave.”

“I’m not, dude. I’m not.”

**

When Stan wakes up he’s in his bed, tucked in tight beneath the blanket facing the wall. The temples of his head are throbbing. His stomach feels concave, as if someone has scooped it straight out of him like a melted tub of ice cream. Blinking away the sleep, his eyes drop down toward his chest. He doesn’t remember undressing, but he remembers very little to begin with. Stan contorts beneath the sheets onto his back, and notices Kyle sitting against the headboard with a comic book laid against his knees. He flips intermittently through its pages. “Morning,” he says, not lifting his eyes from the vibrant illustrations. “How do you feel?”

“What time is it?”

“A little after eight. I woulda thought you’d be out till at least noon.”

“For some reason, I always wake up early after I’ve, uh…y’know.”

He leans up against the wall, only half-listening to Kyle ramble about the ways in which alcohol disrupts the body’s natural circadian rhythm, still feeling keyed-up and out of sorts. He scratches at the side of his face and squeaks out a raspy, “I…I thought you uh, had a debate…thing, or whatever.”

“Eh, I called and said I was sick,” he says. Straightening up and clearing his throat, Kyle puts on a feeble, nasally voice, impersonating himself only an hour earlier, cocking his head innocently as he flutters his eyelashes. “So sorry, can’t go, diabetic emergency, probably gonna die, see you Monday.” He holds up his hands as if he were being held hostage and sticks out his tongue while groaning. Stan musters a sickly giggle as he rolls over to face him, but moves too quickly; his head pulses and pounds with the same intensity of a dying star, atoms crushed and protons seizing as its own mass collapses in on itself. He groans loudly.

“Here,” Kyle says, twisting over the edge of the bed. As Stan presses his palms to his forehead, he listens to Kyle fiddle with something on the nightstand. He’s holding a chilled bottle of water, cap pre-turned and two aspirin in his open palm, presenting them to Stan. “I figured you’d probably have a pretty bad headache when you woke up.” 

With a sigh of gratitude, Stan pops the aspirin into his mouth and gulps them down with a swish of water. He takes a short breath before returning to the bottle, suckling on it fervently until half of it has disappeared into thin air, ignoring Kyle’s warning to slow down or risk upsetting his stomach again. The sensation of the cold water sitting plainly in his gut makes him a little uneasy, but it’s well worth it to quench his dry mouth. “I thought I was sleeping in my clothes,” he says.

“Nah, you changed before that. Threw ‘em in the wash a little while ago. Your jacket, too.”

“Thanks,” Stan sighs, holding his fingers over his eyes. “Ugh, I feel like shit.”

“You look like it, too.”

Stan tosses a light punch to his arm, and they both laugh. Their shoulders bump as they lean together, lavishing in the early morning calm of another gloomy day, the snow gathering and falling away from Stan’s windowsill as it flurries in the air. His memory is slightly spotty, able to recall a little of everything and all of nothing. Arriving at the party was fresh in his mind, as was shot-gunning his first beer with Clyde. Drinks and shots of varying types and proofs were shoved into his hand, gladly sloshing them all down. Bebe was there—why was she there? By herself? He didn’t talk to her, though he felt he should have. It made him call Wendy.

She didn’t appreciate being woken up that late, and was still upset with him from earlier. He apologized profusely, and cringes at the stupid shit he remembered saying about just needing to hear her voice. “Stan…are you drinking?” she asked, her voice caught somewhere between defeat and an accusation. He can hear himself on the phone, nearly tripping and breaking his neck over stray gardening tools in an unfamiliar backyard. He can hear how pathetic he no doubt sounded to her. Wendy bleated about ‘maladaptive coping mechanisms’—a phrase she loved to use when talking about him, so dry and clinical in the way it rolled off her tongue with ease, and he knew she was silently relishing in how knowledgeable it made her seem. Then there was something about being like his father. Stan couldn’t remember exactly how she said it—in the most careful and considerate way possible, surely—but she had said it, and that was all that mattered and she couldn’t take that back. A few prying eyes turned to him as he began to yell, knowing it was the completely wrong response but unable to stop himself. She cried into the speaker, about wanting to help him but not knowing how, not being able to do it anymore, they’ll discuss this later and that she thought they needed to take a break, maybe for good. Wendy hung up before he could say anything else to upset her.

No part of him remembers actually dialing Kyle, only that he was suddenly on the phone with him, a stranger in a strange land who found himself apologizing once again for waking someone up. Kyle’s car was warm and smelled nice. _Did I fight with Kyle in the car?_ He recalls raising his voice again, _but at Kyle? For what?_ There’s a blank stretch in the car ride, the blurred image of him talking without any of the words, running through a silent movie of his own life. Vomiting stands out, as it usually does. The affectionate ripple of Kyle’s hand trailing up and down his back punctuates his trail of thought, his fingertips in his hair and his hand on his knee and the vague feeling of Kyle’s arm closing in around him as he slept.

He wants to return the gesture, but as he moves his hand he realizes Kyle now hunched at the edge of the bed, slipping back on his snow boots. “Well, I should probably get going,” he says. “I told my parents it was moved to another day. My dad has some errands he wants me to run, I told my mom I was just stopping by.”

“Here, I’ll walk you out.”

“Nah, that’s okay, you stay in bed and sleep.”

“No, really,” Stan insists, swinging his legs out from the covers. “I don’t mind—I want to.”

Throwing on a stray t-shirt from the ground and a pair of sweatpants, they exit Stan’s room. They bound down stairs, Stan after Kyle, wishing there was any way he could convince him to spend just a little bit longer in his bed, saying nothing and looking out the window with him. “Is that you, boys?” his mother calls from the kitchen, her tone more chipper than it normally is at this hour. “Yeah mom, just us,” Stan says.

“Are you two hungry? I could make you some breakfast, if you’d like?”

“Actually, I was on my way out,” Kyle says, “But thank you, though.”

“Oh, okay, tell your mother I said hello. Stan? Are you hungry?”

“Not right now, no thanks,” he mumbles slightly too fast, and when his mother asks if he’s _sure_ he’s not hungry, he responds with a, “Yeah, mom, I’m sure,” that is also perhaps too curt. He makes a mental note to apologize to her once Kyle has left.

Once on the doorstep, he immediately regrets the last-minute decision to ditch a pair of shoes, thinking he wouldn’t need them to only step out to say goodbye. He ignores the pins-and-needles sensation in his feet while Kyle pats all the pockets of his clothing, double-checking to make sure he leaves no trace of himself behind. “Hey Kyle?” Stan asks.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. Y’know…for, uh, last night.”

Kyle nods. “No problem, dude. Happy to do it.”

Stan can see the how tired he is: his eyelids are heavy, accompanied by dark circles from so many lost nights of sleep. Tiny copper curls of hair poke out from all directions of his hat as it sits lazily on top of his head. He’s back in his own jacket, huddled into the collar from the cold. Retrieving his keys from his back pocket, he realizes Stan staring at him, a troubled look lingering in his eye. He offers him a mild smile.

Stan slips his arms around Kyle’s waist, locking him into a tight embrace. He can feel his surprise at the force, yet submits no resistance, and lets himself be absorbed into his arms. He feels half-crazy as he struggles not to weep when Kyle tenderly wraps his arms around his neck. There’s a strange, momentous feeling to this hug, as if it were the kind that he might recall fondly when he’s middle-aged and unhappy and yearning for his youth, or perhaps when he’s a thirtysomething in a different city with a different life and he learns after some odd years of not having seen each other that Kyle has suddenly died, young and tragic, or more hopefully, it’s the kind of hug he’ll give to Kyle again and again because he can’t imagine a world wherein which he exists yet Kyle does not. Stan lets his chin delicately hang off his shoulder. The wind nips at his bare skin; each of his hairs stand on end, and he burrows himself deeper into Kyle, gripping the back of his jacket and balling it in his fist and pulling him in closer until he can feel the soft patter of Kyle’s heart beating against his chest, rhythmically pumping in unison with his own. It makes him feel safe. Stan doesn’t want him to leave—he never does—but knows he must. The two of them stand on his front steps like this until he forces himself to let him go.

Kyle pivots his foot to walk off the step with a sigh, and turns to say, “Text me later, okay?”

Stan scratches at his cheek and bows his head, clearing his throat before replying, “I will.”

Stan watches as Kyle drops down off the porch, bundling his arms together and shuffling toward his car. Beneath his shoes, the airy snow crunches under his weight and leaves a trail of footprints on the walkway, flakes of it clinging to his clothes before they dissipate into the cloth. It feels like the last day Stan will ever see him. Of course, it won’t be; he’ll see Kyle tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that—he’ll see Kyle every day of the foreseeable future. But it’s different now. All he can fixate on is the thought that Kyle will climb inside his car, turn toward him, allow him that small, hurried wave he always does, and drive right out of his life straight to a public ivy on the east coast, or perhaps even somewhere up north in the Midwest, where he’ll make smarter, more interesting, less emotionally unstable friends. Kyle has always just been passing through. Stan sat with the very real terror that he could live and die here, trapped and shaken in the insular snow globe that is South Park. When Kyle signals his departure with that stupid, wonderful little wave, it takes everything within Stan to return it. The engine starts, idles for a few seconds, and Kyle smiles at him one last time through the window that begins to fog, driving off down the end of the street and disappearing around the corner. Stan denies himself the overwhelming impulse to cry, and instead slips back into the house to forgo experiencing his feelings by redeeming the offer of pancakes from his mother and his medication.

As he settles back into his bed, he drifts in and out of sleep through naps that only leave him feeling more tired. A knock on his door startles him, but it’s only his mother telling him that dinner will be ready in about five minutes, tacking on after he agrees to come down that she’d really, really appreciate the chance to talk with him after they eat. He grumbles to himself, pulling his head beneath the blanket. The talk that she wants to have is the same talk they hash over at least once a month: a mix between her worrying that his independence comes at the price of her enabling him, and constant reassurances that she loves him. “Okay,” he calls, and he hears her scurrying back down the stairs.

The light outside is faint, the pink and orange swirls of midday beginning to fade gray, the streetlamps at the end of the corner highlighting the whirling flakes of snow that twist and flutter in the cold air. He pulls the blue glow of his phone to his face and examines his notifications. Through Clyde’s snapchat, he stumbles upon a brief video of the two of them taking double-shots of Jose Cuervo, and Stan feels as if he might throw up again as he recalls the scent of cheap tequila burrowing into his nose. There’s a text from Token about if he got home all right. Nothing from Wendy. He’s surprised to find two from Kyle, wondering how he possibly could have missed them. He becomes even more curious when he realizes the first is a voicemail from the night before. Quickly pressing play, he holds the speaker to his ear.

_Hey Stan, it’s me, uh…you just called me like, literally ten minutes ago and now for some reason I can’t get through to you. I hope your phone didn’t die on you…well, uh, I guess it wouldn’t ring if it did. I hope you didn’t lose it, then. Or that you’re not just ignoring my call for some reason. Um…I’m on my way? I’m not exactly sure where you are, but I’ll find you. I hope – ah – you’re not too cold, or you have, like, somewhere warm to wait…I really don’t like the thought of you just sitting out there in the snow. Please don’t wander off, dude._

_I’m really psyching myself out here, heh…uh…I’m not exactly sure why it feels so important to leave you this message when I know you won’t hear it. But it does. Like, even though you won’t hear it, you’ll feel it, or know it, o-or something. I know that sounds stupid. Um…do you remember when we were uh, like, eight? And you told me that you didn’t want to die until I did? I’ve been thinking about that lately, for some reason. It meant a lot to me—it still does…I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I think I’m just rambling at this point because I wish you were here with me. I guess you will be soon enough…How long do these things even get recorded for, anyway? I have no idea. I’ve never actually thought about it—I hope it doesn’t just cut me off mid-sentence or something._

_Well, now I’m worried about that, so I guess I’m going to hang up now. I’ll be there soon…I, uh…I love you, Stan. I don’t want you to die until I do, either._

The second is a text from Kyle, sent only a little over ten minutes ago:

_You feeling any better?_

Blinking away the warm tears budding in his eyes, he pokes the screen to send whatever semblance of a message he can manage.

_yeah, much better now_

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I've recently been dragged back into the never-ending hell that is the South Park fandom after a few years, and forgot just how much I loved the dynamic and friendship and love between Stan and Kyle. This is the first fic I've taken a stab at; I drew some of the inspiration for this story from events in my own life and have tried to write the boys as true to how I interpret each of their characters as possible. If you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed it. xx


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